Four decades have passed since Amaterasu Takahashi lost her daughter and grandson in Nagasaki's atomic destruction. Now an octogenarian widow living in Philadelphia, she's shocked by the arrival of a disfigured stranger claiming to be that grandson. He brings letters from the past, as well as...
*STARRED REVIEW On an afternoon in November 1999, the 50,000-strong disruption of the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle imploded with tear gas and violence. Sunil Yapa’s debut pivots around teenage runaway Victor, whose initial plans to sell marijuana for profit morphs into tenacious participation with...
Thanks to his "fellow countryman," our peripatetic Turkey-bound Englishman, Mr. Smith, finds himself welcomed into a lavish Persian home. "I'm impressed, Boss," his guide and companion Ali remarks, "You sure know some powerful people." Momentarily glimpsed but intentionally hidden in the sprawling compound is Anis, the...
Sam, Samir, and Nina met in law school in Paris. Sam and Nina were lovers. While Sam was briefly away, Samir shared Nina's bed, after which Sam attempted suicide and won Nina back. Fast-forward almost two decades: Sam and Nina are poor and desperate but still...
'The Queen of the Night' blends opera and mystery into a grandiose read Fourteen-plus years after his Whiting Award-ed debut, Edinburgh, hit shelves in late 2001, literary social media-darling Alexander Chee returns with The Queen of the Night, in which another – albeit very different –...
Multiple narratives swirl around Alma Belasco, a Polish teenager who escaped the Nazis in 1939 and arrived in San Francisco to share a privileged life with an indulgent aunt and uncle. Now 73, Alma is a favorite resident in a senior facility, devotedly looked after...
*STARRED REVIEW Ruth Bader Ginsberg (b. 1933) is legend: she was Columbia University's first female tenured professor; she published the first casebook on sex discrimination; she was the second woman to sit on the nation's highest court; and she was the first Supreme Court justice to...
*STARRED REVIEW It’s true: “When Ruth Law made up her mind, there was no use trying to stop her.” With tenacious aplomb, Law announced that she would fly from Chicago to New York in one day – a distance, in 1916, that had never before been...
Thank the stars for all the women who never succumbed to 'you can't' and 'you're not allowed,' and the constant cacophony of insistent 'no's. Meet another such hero: drum dream girl. In spite of her strikingly diverse heritage – Chinese, African, and Cuban! – all her elders agree...
"I believe that art is an essential element of revolution," Leila Abdelrazaq begins her "Artist Statement" on her website. She's half Palestinian and half American activist based in Chicago with a 2015 DePaul University degree who has generations of stories to share. Her Baddawi began as a webcomic "...
*STARRED REVIEW Says a grateful admirer to Joseph and his unlikely traveling companion, “You boys. You got some kind of courage.” In the Wild West of 1890 Washington State, Joseph, not yet 13, has lost his mother and sister to typhoid and his father to a...
Oh, oh, oh. What a perceptive, thoughtful, gorgeous gift are these pages. Yes, if books have a soul, this would be it – not to mention history, context, and universal appeal bound in as well. Guyanese British poet/playwright/children's writer John Agard 'transcribes' the story of Book over the centuries and...
Her name alone is imbued with such meaningful history. She was called Arnaktauyok by her mother, in accordance with a request made by a blind woman who took care of her motherless mother, who insisted a baby with such a name "would have very good eyes." That...
Death by Water takes readers on a wild ride of epic proportions In addition to being noted for his prodigious literary accomplishments, 1994 Nobel Prize-winning Kenzaburō Ōe is known for being politically outspoken. He made international headlines again during this year’s 70th anniversary of the Nagasaki/Hiroshima...
The year is 1913. Zeynep and Ali are teenage lovers in Anatolia (once Asia Minor, now modern Turkey) who part with a lingering sense of bitterness: Ali's impending departure breaks their promise of escaping their village together. Feeling betrayed, Zeynep turns away: "I refuse to be your...
The late Iris Chang almost single-handedly taught the western world about the horrors of the Nanking Massacre in her 1997 The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Over six weeks that began with the Imperial Japanese Army's capture of China's then-capital city of...
Ferguson one year later and another shooting. Black Lives Matter activists shut down Bernie Sanders. And that's just the last 24 hours. Listen to Toni Morrison: "This is required reading," she extols on the cover of this slim, tense volume of just 152 pages. Many have...
Flood of Fire brings the astounding, exceptional Ibis Trilogy to a close Readers of this review will fall into two categories: (1) Those who are already two-thirds invested in the Ibis Trilogy, and (2) Newbies who might be wondering if continuing the perusal of this review...
