Following the success of her lauded “We Set the Dark on Fire” duology, Tehlor Kay Mejia makes her middle grade debut, proving mothers are always right, ghosts exist, and La Llorona is legit. From 12 to eternal, desperate parent to dismissive cop, madwoman to murderer,...
The Night Marchers and Other Oceanian Tales is the fourth installment in Iron Circus Comics' geographically specific Cautionary Fables & Fairytales series: African tales in The Girl Who Married a Skull, Asian stories in Tamamo the Fox Maiden, and European fare in The Nixie of the Mill-Pond. Volume four...
Back in 1977, “Anacostia was still the New World, an isle of blood and desire.” In Washington, DC-native Morowa Yejidé’s (Time of the Locust, 2014) moody, bleak sophomore title, boundaries between the living and the dead are indiscernible. Once upon a time, Nephthys and Osiris...
*STARRED REVIEW It opens with the mellifluous Dion Graham and ends with an always-appreciated who-read-whom at recording’s end. In between, the horror is unrelenting, yet the three narrators persist with tenacious dignity and grace. Graham enthralls as the titular “my mother’s house” – Kay Manman Mwen...
A chance to redo the past in Before the Coffee Gets Cold Time travel and café culture yields a lovely, wise brew in a translation of Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s popular play-turned-novel. Originally debuting onstage in Japan, Before the Coffee Gets Cold won praise and awards for its playwright, Toshikazu Kawaguchi....
*STARRED REVIEW Banished from a large private city hospital, the doctor has run a remote village clinic for three years. His “pharmacist” is an untrained young woman, her husband on call for urgent labor. Despite the doctor’s acerbic demeanor, his care is unreproachable, even self-funding necessary...
As spare as it might initially seem, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay's wickedly entertaining novel, The Aunt Who Wouldn't Die, manages smoothly to illuminate gender inequity, cultural biases, socioeconomic disparity, and familial dysfunction through a three-generational ghost story. At 18, Somlata is wed to her 32-year-old husband, the "blissfully...
Mexican Canadian Silvia Moreno-Garcia is an award-winning, genre-hopping literary chameleon, having successfully written fantasy, fairy tales, vampiric adventure, noir, short stories. Clearly channeling her inner H.P. Lovecraft in Mexican Gothic, she's created her own varietal of irresistible 1950s fungal horror. Socialite Noemí is summoned home early...
He’s “something like a six-legged beast made of pure darkness,” but come morning, he’s back to being “too serious” middle-schooler Adachi. More observer than participant among his peers, he keeps silent as the class pariah, Yano, is bullied almost daily. When a few boys, claiming...
*STARRED REVIEW “I am not well read, nor am I a craftswoman of language,” the Mumbai-based journalist/educator Shubhangi Swarup insists in an author’s note to her editor. And yet her debut novel will certainly be one of the most wondrous literary achievements to hit the shelves...
Lake Geneva in 1816 is home (in two rented properties) to five English travelers, three made eternal through their writing, one among that trio renowned for creating (inhuman) life, literally. Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein there, accompanied by her poet husband Percy Shelley, fellow poet Lord Byron,...
Laura Ruby’s (Bone Gap, 2015) narrator – her name eventually revealed as Pearl – is dead. Pearl’s primary object of attention is not: Frankie, who’s 14 in 1941, is a “half orphan” relegated to a Chicago orphanage with her siblings by their living Italian immigrant father,...
b, Book, and Me by Kim Sagwa and translated by Sunhee Jeong Although this book is set in a coastal suburb outside Seoul, the cycle of neglect by stressed or careless adults can and does happen anywhere. In such an all-too-familiarly indifferent environment, lauded Korean writer...
After making her author and narrator debut with The Ghost Bride (2014), Yangsze Choo reprises her double-duty with this equally intriguing sophomore title. With her crisp, British colonial inflections, Choo is her own ideal reader, knowing exactly how her characters should sound. Set in 1930s British...
*STARRED REVIEW Although the page facing the title of Azar’s first novel to be translated into English clearly states, “Translated from the Farsi,” the linguistic enabler remains anonymous; the publisher’s official line is, “the translator of this book has asked not to be named out of...
In one of the most inexcusable examples of careless casting or lazy producing or both, David Peace (Red or Dead) gets utterly short-changed by Ric Jerrom's exasperating performance, from grievous mispronunciations of the majority of the Japanese names and words – including even Peace's protagonist...
Eisner-winning Peter Kuper’s career of “translating Kafka into comics” began in 1995, when his initial collection of nine shorts hit shelves, with Give It Up! He adds another five here, scrambles the previous order, and includes his “Kuperesque” foreword, emphasizing how, since Kafka’s death at...
In fall 2014, Cécile Brun and Olivier Pichard (fictional versions of the artists who comprise Atelier Sentō) traveled to Niigata Prefecture on Japan’s west coast. To escape the rain, they duck into a dimly lit shop, where they discover a camera that can allegedly “shoot...
*STARRED REVIEW Leigh and best friend Axel "figure out what the other person's feeling" by asking "'What color?’": "carbazole violet" for silence, "burnt orange" for anger, "Prussian blue" for hurt. Their unexpected first kiss sets off a "whole goddamn spectrum" of feelings Leigh doesn't have time...
Here's your upfront warning: gruesome horror ahead. As one of Japan's most successful horror manga artists, Junji Ito knows how to make your hair rise, your heart race, your stomach churn. This one comes with quite the social commentary, too: beware of empty, false apologies....
