Success nearly killed Perumal Murugan. Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature, his cult novel, One Part Woman, was viciously condemned and publicly burnt in his native India for revealing the culture of his remote village to the outside world. Murugan declared...
“I suppose I should warn you that I tell a story like a woman: looping into myself, interrupting,” announces Catherine Chung’s protagonist Katherine. “Things have never seemed straightforward to me; the path has never been clear.” As the child of a WWII veteran father and...
Novelist and physicist Alan Lightman (Einstein's Dreams) has traveled twice yearly since 2003 to Cambodia to work with his Harpswell Foundation which empowers women leaders in Cambodia and Southeast Asia. In his first novel in seven years, Lightman’s opening dedication directly spotlights Harpswell’s “strong and...
*STARRED REVIEW In her September 16, 2019, cover article for Time magazine, Atwood recalls informing the showrunner for the Emmy-winning Hulu adaptation of her iconic The Handmaid’s Tale, “You absolutely cannot kill Aunt Lydia, or I will have your head on a plate.” Aunt Lydia, it...
Justine Eyre takes a voyage around and through the world, voicing three centuries of enigmatic, peripatetic characters in Pola Oloixarac’s genre-defying latest. Divided into three distinct sections, the epic – a mere five hours in duration but dense as multi-layered allegory – opens in the...
Best known for her canonic, autobiographical short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and her nonfiction declaration, Women and Economics, Charlotte Perkins Gilman remains one of history’s greatest feminists. Written in 1915, Herland was initially serialized in Gilman’s own magazine, The Forerunner, but didn’t appear in book-form until 1979. That she...
This is the first of a two-part series. Part II will publish on Friday, August 30, 2019. Before I can name even a single author or title, I must express my constantly regenerating, overflowing gratitude to translators who enable readers anywhere and everywhere to literally experience the...
*STARRED REVIEW Maaza Mengiste’s indelible first novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gate (2010), put Ethiopian historical fiction on countless best-of, must-read, and award lists. Her monumental new novel draws inspiration from her great-grandmother, who as the eldest and in Mulan-style answered Emperor Haile Selassie’s demand for first...
In Milani’s graphic biography of the iconic Marie Curie, soon-to-be Nobel winner Ernest Rutherford explains the theory of transmutation in less than a dozen panels to Marie Curie’s “interested in science” daughter, Irène – so young, she calls it “tramputation.” That transparent accessibility repeats throughout,...
The eerie chill factor proves unrelenting throughout Sophie Mackintosh’s 2018 debut, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and is further intensified by three formidable narrators who take turns revealing the dissolution of an isolated, splintered family. Grace, Lia, and Sky are three daughters – their...
Organized by the Academy of American Poets, National Poetry Month, in April, has been celebrated annually since 1996. While reading, writing, even performing poetry should be a year-round activity, National Poetry Month is a welcome catalyst to get verse newbies and doubters interested and involved. In...
In Robin Miles’s rich, rhythmic narration, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s (I Do Not Come to You By Chance) latest – written in chapters that are sometimes just a few lines – sounds like verse poetry. The story is hardly soothing, based on interviews with 2014 Boko...
If the middle-grade Filipino American market had an audio representative, Amielynn Abellera would be the reigning voice. She’s already narrated two of Newbery Medal-winning Filipino American Erin Entrada Kelly’s three MG titles, and she’s quite the energetic cipher for debut novelist Marie Miranda Cruz’s feisty...
Class, gender, and religious differences in post-WWII Manhattan drive this debut novel from the pseudonymous Zeldis in which two worlds literally collide in the opening chapter. Caught in a fender bender, Eleanor Moskowitz and Patricia Bellamy emerge from their respective taxis in a rare chance...
*STARRED REVIEW So transforming was Fenella Woolgar’s performance of Kate Atkinson’s stupendous Life after Life (2013), the immediate reaction here is joyful relief at hearing Woolgar take aural control of another Atkinson novel. From an inexperienced, untested teenager embarking on her first job, in 1940, to...
“No matter how many books you’ve read, no one has ever told you a story like this one.” The prologue’s emphathic statement is not exactly accurate. Tara Westover’s Educated (2018) and Anouk Markovits’ I Am Forbidden (2012) feature women trapped by religion and culture who...
The Tale of Cho Ung introduces Korean classic tale to English speakers Despite being “the best-selling fictional narrative during the late Chosŏn period” (1392-1910) of pre-modern Korea, little is known about the provenance of The Tale of Cho Ung. The author remains unknown and its initial composition...
*STARRED REVIEW At 12, Artemisia Gentileschi loses her mother, but not before "Prudentia Montone spent/ the last of her strength/ to burn into [Artemisia's] mind/ the tales of women/ no one else would/ think to tell" – including biblical heroines Susannah and Judith, who thwarted male...
When she was 25, Forbes named Khalida Brohi to its 2014 "30 Under 30: Social Entrepreneurs" list for founding Sughar Foundation, which trains and empowers rural Pakistani women. Brohi makes both her authorial and performance debuts as she chronicles her journey from a rural Pakistani...
That Curtis Sittenfeld bookends her first short story collection with references to Trump seems to signal that bad behavior – dishonesty, betrayal, resentment, even hatred – will be plentiful in between. The agitation she immediately incites with the opening story, “Gender Studies,” about a recently...
