The first thing Walter Mosley (Charcoal Joe) devotees will want to know is whether Joe King Oliver is getting a series of his own. That future seems currently unclear, but should King proliferate on the page, then Dion Graham must be conscripted to continue his...
After a Salt Lake City reading, novelist Tim is approached in – okay, stalked to – a convenience store by Danny, a former college writing classmate. Danny has a mysterious manuscript for Tim, which has quite the provenance story involving Danny in São Paulo on...
*STARRED REVIEW Difficult life circumstances bring together two Indian village girls: Poornima meets Savitha because Poornima's recently widowed father needs help weaving saris; clever, kind Savitha must help support her impoverished family. The pair are soon inseparable, nurturing each other in a society in which their...
Never mind the children who play in the Upper East Side schoolyard of St. Timothy's just off Park Avenue – it's the parents who display the serious behavioral issues. On everyone's radar is Philippa Lye, whose elegant aloofness makes her the most coveted friend. Into this...
Reba Buhr can't correctly pronounce the California city of Marin, but she sure can modulate her versatile voice to match the various ages and backgrounds of the women and girls who populate the 16 stories of Danielle Lazarin’s superb debut collection. Buhr embodies youth in...
Shoved onto the asphalt by police, lying "parallel like burial plots" next to her husband Roy in a motel parking lot, Celestial recalls her wedding proclamation: "What God has brought together, let no man tear asunder." But an American marriage – especially if a black...
For five preteen Camp Forevermore girls, a simple overnight kayaking trip turns horrifying when their group leader dies mysteriously and the girls must find their way back alone. One insists on remaining with the corpse; the others leave and promise to send help. Interspersed with their...
The lives of two girls, the narrator and Nadia, born during the Iran-Iraq War are continuously delineated by conflict. As young children, they meet in a Baghdad air-raid shelter under siege in 1991’s Operation Desert Storm and become best friends. Their growing up is marked...
Continuing the story begun in Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s 2016 Newbery Honor book, The War That Saved My Life , World War II rages on, and Ada is now 11. She has escaped London and her abusive mother and finally has the surgery to reverse her...
Knowing each other's stories – even the most private details – doesn't equate with the true intimacy of having "someone to talk to." The two distinct sections of Liu's (Remembering 1942) latest Anglophone-friendly novel present two such lonely men whose seemingly unrelated lives share a...
Award-winning poet Dunya Mikhail, an Iraqi exile who fled her homeland in 1996 and eventually settled in Michigan, makes her nonfiction debut with a hybrid text that combines reportage and personal memoir with the intention of giving voice to northern Iraqi women victims of Daesh...
A Poet’s Novel: Jon Pineda talks LET’S NO ONE GET HURT Even a poetry dullard like me recognizes poet/memoirist/novelist Jon Pineda’s ability to do something spectacular with language. His lean sentences are surprisingly dense, as if to defy their brevity. Surely publishing three award-winning books of...
Twelve-year-old Jerome was always "the good kid": "I've got troubles but I don't get in trouble." He's the son of a motel receptionist mother and sanitation officer father. His grandmother keeps house, so that he and his younger sister aren't home alone. At school, Jerome...
"Twirly-whirly,/ loop-dee-loop" takes Trampoline Boy up "into the blue, blue sky." Each "BOING" enables him to see something new, from his own backyard to far beyond the clouds. In the morning, after school, and "until the sky turn[s] pink," Trampoline Boy finds contentment in the...
Although Fresh is Pulitzer Prize-winning Jeffrey Eugenides's (Middlesex) first-ever collection, the contents might seem familiar as only two of the 10 stories are actually "fresh" – the opening "Complainers" and closing "Fresh Complaint." The rest appeared in various publications between 1989 and 2013. What's truly new...
John Scalzi (Redshirts) explains in his snappy introduction, which he reads, that he has "two natural [writing] speeds": novel-long and "really short." This 18-piece collection showcases his "fast, punchy, and to the point"-shortest. For such a "miniature" book, it's got quite a full cast: Allyson...
Mira T. Lee’s impressive debut – both a celebration and mourning of the bond between two sisters, the younger afflicted with mental illness, the elder desperate to save her – deserves better aural interpretation. The full cast (in rare recognition, a who-was-who is added at...
“I can’t think of a happier story”: Shobha Rao talks GIRLS BURN BRIGHTER After 15 years of writing and 15 years being rejected, Shobha Rao made her fiction debut two years ago with An Unrestored Woman, a collection of a dozen impeccable stories – savage and...
*STARRED REVIEW During Japan’s brutal occupation of Korea (1910–45), marked by systematic suppression of the Korean language, culture, and identity, Yi T’aejun produced stories that were “considered among the best of his time.” Translator Janet Poole’s impressive introduction not only contextualizes Yi’s significance in the Korean canon...
Twenty-six-year-old, four-months-pregnant Cedar Hawk Songmaker was adopted by Minneapolis liberals but has recently reconnected with her extended Ojibwe birth family. Reunion notwithstanding, the world is in dystopic collapse – evolution is in rapid reverse, the Church of the New Constitution has usurped control, the human...
