Although the cover of Bi's novel displays a character for "triple happiness" – ostensibly representing the eponymous three sisters – readers shouldn't expect a happily-ever-after tale. After seven daughters, Party Secretary Wang sees his self-esteem redeemed with the birth of a son. Firstborn Yumi, the de facto...
In today's tough times filled with unemployment woes and economic downturns, The Can Man is all too real a story. Once a neighbor with a job – and a real name, Mr. Peters – the homeless man everyone just calls The Can Man wanders the...
How fitting to finish reading University of Michigan Professor Scott Kurashige's debut title on the 68th annual Day of Remembrance, which marks the anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt which led to the imprisonment of 120,000 Americans of...
Half the Sky is a remarkable, life-changing book. It should be required reading for all adults (and more mature young adults), but especially for us overprivileged, lucky-solely-by-chance-of-birth citizens of the West. If there is ONE book you read this new year, let it be this...
One Halloween night when Anne Greves is 16, she goes with older friends to a jazz club and falls in love for the first time in her young life. Serey is an older man, already in his 20s, a musician, who has already lived too...
Three weeks after 9/11, University of Arizona professor Adele Barker arrived in Sri Lanka as a senior Fulbright Scholar to teach Russian literature, feminist literary theory, and American literature to select students at the University of Peradeniya. But her own education about the history and...
The final volume of Keiji Nakazawa's 10-part Barefoot Gen series begins in March 1953, almost eight years after the widespread decimation of August 1945 caused by American-dropped atomic bombs. Gen and his friends have established a routine in their young lives, with Ryuta, Katsuko, and Musubi working...
Hiroshima survivor Keiji Nakazawa's graphic testimony continues in the penultimate volume of the heart-wrenching Barefoot Gen series, finally available in an unabridged English translation of all 10 volumes from San Francisco's renegade publisher Last Gasp. Alone and newly homeless, Nakazawa's fictionalized stand-in, Gen Nakaoka, moves in with...
Young Henry Bell's master insists that "he'll take an ax to the finger of any slave who touches a book." But before his father was sold away, he told his son that "book learning" would provide the way out of slavery. When Master Simon starts school,...
The remarkable story begun in The New Sun continues in this second volume of Taro Yashima's graphic memoir, a strikingly simple combination of pictures and brief text that capture a man's journey away from his homeland. Long out of print since its 1947 first printing, Horizon...
Even though the back of the galley says Compestine's latest title is for "Ages 12 and up," I'd definitely recommend saving it for much older readers. These are some of the most realistically gruesome tales outside of Halloween, not to mention dealing with more adult...
First an interruption: I learned a very entertaining meaning for a certain common(-ish) word on the first page of Shamsie's second novel: 'bugaboo.' "It's a word that demands to be said out loud," writes Shamsie, "particularly among bilingual Pakistanis who recognize its resemblance to 'baghal...
Without a doubt, the most remarkable part of this striking new edition of Jane Yolen's 1977 title are the pictures. The story is simple: a Chinese emperor's daughter, blind since birth, learns to "see" with the help of a wise old man and his mysteriously...
Volume One: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima Volume Two: The Day After Volume Three: Life After the Bomb Volume Four: Out of the Ashes Volume Five: The Never-Ending War Volume Six: Writing the Truth Volume Seven: Bones into Dust Volume Eight: Merchants of Death Atom bomb. Unimaginable horrors. Survival against all odds. Bearing...
The Booklist review blurb on the stark black back cover (with a heart-breaking pink balloon floating away) should serve as quite the warning: "Not for gentle readers." Probably best known as a playwright, Adam Rapp has certainly created a busy, award-winning career by exploring the darker characteristics...
So indulge me for a reductive semantic moment: 'serious' comic books are graphic novels (say, Archie vs. Will Eisner's A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories); in Japanese terms, 'serious' manga is also known as gekiga. If you're interested (otherwise skip to next paragraph), here's...
Based on actual tragic event in a remote Indian coalmine in 2001, Badahur – an ex-director in the Indian Ministry of Coal until 2006 – makes his literary debut with a scathing insider's look at the tainted coal industry. Badahur recounts the multifaceted layers of the...
Two seemingly disparate stories open this engrossing debut novel. Latha, who enjoys the smaller luxuries of life – bathing with a stolen bar of pink Lux soap – is both servant and best friend to Thara, the only child of the Vithanages with whom the young...
If you don't think you've got the time to read this whole book, turn at least to the very end (don't expect to hear me say that again anytime soon!) and read Yunus' inspiring lecture he gave when he and his remarkable Grameen Bank together deservedly won the...
Despite his prestigious college degree which should have guaranteed him a bright future, Azel is unable to find meaningful work in his native Tangier, a city in northern Morocco. Mired in self-absorbed disappointment, he spends his days and nights lost in women, wine, and song,...
