'Sour Heart' author Jenny Zhang illuminates the immigrant's struggles to belong “Lena Dunham is like my fairy godmother,” Jenny Zhang revealed in a recent interview with The Guardian, albeit one who tweets and emails with unsolicited offers of editorial help. In the often capricious world of...
*STARRED REVIEW Commemorating 10 extraordinary years of PalFest, the Palestine Festival of Literature, mother-son cofounders Soueif (Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed, 2014) and Hamilton (The City Always Wins, 2017) gathered 47 literary luminaries to create this essential testimony, including Suad Amiry, J. M. Coetzee, Teju...
'Reading with Patrick' tells of a teacher's extraordinary journey Pontificating with superlatives only halfway through the calendar year might prove short-sighted, but risking humiliated inaccuracy seems to be a negligible consequence for claiming that Reading with Patrick could be the most affecting book you’ll read this...
Despite Maureen Corrigan’s rather nasty NPR review of Korean author Kyung-sook Shin’s 2011 Stateside debut, Please Look After Mom – her phrase “cheap consolations of kimchee-scented Kleenex fiction” caused particular affront – Mom became a major bestseller. In a stroke of well-deserved vindication, Shin became the first woman...
'The Windfall' adroitly probes questions of money and true worth Mr. Jha, who not so long ago comfortably supported his family on a monthly salary equivalent to $200, sells his website for $20 million. That titular “windfall” transforms his life – and, of course, that of...
Talking Race, Kid Lit, and EVERYBODY’S SON with Thrity Umrigar About 15 years ago, when Thrity Umrigar was already a successful journalist and about to become an English professor, she attended a lecture at Emerson College in Boston and left with her first literary agent. Shortly thereafter, her debut...
*STARRED REVIEW Soli is still a teenager when she becomes pregnant during her journey from her native Mexican village to northern California. Partly joyous because she's love-struck, mostly nightmarish for what she must endure to survive, Soli enters the United States illegally and eventually finds a...
This is the first in a two-part series of recommended books for youth about the refugee experience. For a list of middle grade and YA titles, click here. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), also known as the United Nations Refugee Agency,...
*STARRED REVIEW As both the introductory note and epithet doubly insist, August Town, divided into two words, is a real town in Jamaica, made (in)famous for being the founding home of Bedwardism, a short-lived, early twentieth-century religion. Fast-forward to 1982 when teary Kaia comes home to his...
Korean studies professor Shepherd Iverson, who describes his eight-year residency in South Korea as having “gone native,” promises a “monograph ...
Twelve-year-old Jin Yi records "interesting moments and details" in her memory notebook while watching customers shop in her Korean American family's Harlem bodega: "[P]eople will tell you their stories in the way that they move, how their faces look, how they speak." Observing turns to...
Ever since she was a child, Janie Chang was steeped in family tales she inherited from her parents about the generations that came before. For decades, she remained the family’s repository until, at age 53, she presented the world with her debut novel, Three Souls,...
The three-generation Kim Dynasty has made North Korea one of the most reviled – and ridiculed – nations in the world. Memes depicting Kim Jong-un laughing about the fact that he’s “no longer the craziest leader” keep popping up on social feeds, even while reports...
*STARRED REVIEW Initially published in South Korea in 2014, The Accusation continues to make international history as the first literary work smuggled out of repressive North Korea, now headed for shelves around the world. Bandi – whose pseudonym is derived from firefly, an obvious nod to...
*STARRED REVIEW A decade after her international best-selling debut, Free Food for Millionaires (2007), Min Jin Lee’s follow-up is an exquisite, haunting epic that crosses almost a century, four generations, and three countries while depicting an ethnic Korean family that cannot even claim a single shared...
*STARRED REVIEW When a bomb explodes in a Delhi market in May 1996, the 11- and 13-year-old Khurana brothers, who were sent to pick up the family's repaired television, are killed, while their friend Mansoor Ahmed, 12, somehow survives. The senseless tragedy inextricably binds the two...
Kate has always been a liar – out of necessity rather than malice. She's smart and savvy and knows how to be a good friend. She's also the best scholarship student Manhattan's tony Waverly School has ever had. Olivia, by contrast, has grown up with every...
Some time, somewhere, Little Town and Old Country are separated by borders and bombs. If Little Town is said to be filthy, broke, and run by ragtag criminals, Old Country is conformist, rich, and militaristic. Almost 15, cautious Little Towner Charlie Law stays relatively safe...
When 11-year-old Azalea Morgan and her mother arrive in Paris Junction, Arkansas, in August 1952, her mother barely lasts a few minutes in her gossipy, small-town childhood home before she turns the car around, leaving her daughter behind to help her injured grandmother with her...
At 4, Mawi Asgedom fled the civil war cleaving Eritrea and Ethiopia, spending three years in a Sudanese refugee camp. In 1983, assisted by World Relief, the family settled in a Chicago suburb. Their new life wasn't easy: Asgedom's father, once a respected community leader and...
