Four strangers – Taburo, Pii-tan, Baracchi, Maruso – gather for the first time and embark on their “journey to paradise”: “We met on the suicide site Black Paradox, and now we’re each other’s final companions.” The quartet’s reasons for seeking death suggest strange parallels: “So the...
Irish cartoonist Emily McGovern’s sophomore graphic novel slyly examines screen-dependent twentysomethings stumbling through London life. At 25, Katie still lacks steady employment (and income). She rents a small room with gender-fluid, not-working artist Nas in has-been actor Jeremy’s townhouse. Katie and Nas are ex-best friends who...
Edmund White, arguably the godfather of gay literature, has published dozens of lauded titles over the last half-century. His autobiographical trilogy of gay identity – A Boy's Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), and The Farewell Symphony (1997) – remains a classic. With this volume, the...
Reminiscent of Groundhog Day-like repetition, each chapter duplicates the same opening paragraphs, ending with the same “gross love language” (but watch for that perspective shift). The intriguing premise is that an unnamed university junior in Kyoto reveals how he “accomplished absolutely nothing” in his first two years....
“‘Your life is like a telenovela!’” Carmen Rita Wong’s daughter tells her after another complication in Wong’s labyrinthine search for her biological father. Born to Dominican immigrant mother Lupe, Wong and older brother Alex called Lupe’s estranged Chinese immigrant husband, Peter Wong, “Papi.” Lupe was a...
“I bet everybody sets at least one world record without even knowing it,” claims Guy Delisle’s sister in the titular short. Sure, such records can’t be verified, but “thanks to the magic of comics, [Delisle’s] done the verifications” to showcase random record holders for never...
Will Betke-Brunswick alchemizes their beloved mother’s death into an affecting tribute to emotional resilience and everlasting love. For reasons not quite clear, Betke-Brunswick transforms their immediate quartet (two parents, two kids) into an adorable waddle of penguins, with extended family, friends, and acquaintances presented as...
The cover boasts a recommendation from global phenom BTS’s leader RM. The PR materials tout its “runaway best-seller” status in its native South Korea, where mental illness remains stigmatized in a country with one of the world’s highest suicide rates. As a twentysomething social media director...
Multiple shes and cats populate this gratifying, slim novel-in-stories, which arrives with a decades-long history that undoubtedly underscores its timeless appeal. Makoto Shinkai launched his career as one of Japan’s most lauded animation and manga artists with the five-minute film, She and Her Cat (1999), later expanded...
*STARRED REVIEW Prodigious National Book Award-winning, 1998 MacArthur “Genius” Charles Johnson is now in his 70s, having been repeatedly lauded in multiple genres. Perhaps not as well known is that Johnson began his literary career as a cartoonist (in high school!) – and never stopped drawing,...
*STARRED REVIEW Among the perennially relevant, permanently indisputable pioneers of the graphic genre is Art Spiegelman, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus remains a groundbreaking masterpiece. The provenance for that achievement is a 1972 three-page strip, included in this celebrated historical compilation, which was first published in 1978...
*STARRED REVIEW Sarayu (just Sara at her English university) has a scholarship so tight that she dreams of telling her benefactor how “an extra hundred pounds would make not the tiniest difference to his life but would transform [hers].” She finds comfort – not to mention...
*STARRED REVIEW French comics creator Fabien Toulmé’s stupendous trilogy concludes Hakim’s epic three-year odyssey from war-torn Syria to finally reaching safety in France. Hannah Chute returns to deftly translate the third volume. To remind audiences of previous events – though reading in order is a gratifying must...
PEN/Faulkner finalist Matthew Salesses, a transracial Korean adoptee, again distills his own experiences with race and (e)masculinity for laudable literary inspiration in The Sense of Wonder. His intricate novel spotlights three basketball players at different points of their careers – starting out, at the pinnacle,...
*STARRED REVIEW Kimberly Farr is clearly Elizabeth Strout’s chosen voice, now reading the fourth of the Amgash series featuring Lucy Barton. It’s March 2020. Lucy’s first husband William convinces her to leave New York City for Maine. “I did not know that one of my friends...
Emi Yagi’s first novel, which won Japan’s Dazai Osamu Prize for the best debut fiction, is a brilliant exposé of discontented contemporary womanhood. Shibata’s professional life has been plagued by men – from sexual harassment at her last job to sexist roles at her current....
Once upon a time, they seemed to be an ideal family: parents Hank and Karen Liu Brighton; their biracial daughters Morgan and Riley. They owned a small organic grocery store in Eugene, Oregon, then expanded into a globally sourced luxury goods empire called Kaleidoscope. First, Morgan...
Indie publisher Tuttle showcases Filipino creator Arnold Arre, whose The Mythology Class (another Tuttle title) was the first comic to win the Philippine National Book Award. Renowned for his fantasy works, Arre describes Halina Filipina as a “no-frills relationship story” in an afterword describing the...
Jennifer J. Chow inaugurates her L.A. Night Market Mysteries (after the Winston Wong and Sassy Cat/Mimi Lee series), which turns two cousins into unlikely sleuths. Yale Yee is still mourning her mother’s death. She quit her family’s dim sum restaurant and found solace in a...
*STARRED REVIEW Both debut author Tracy Dawson and Kendra Hoffman, a narrator we need to hear more from, share notable improv experience, making them a superb pairing to inform and delight. Dawson highlights dozens of trailblazing women who dressed as men to gain access and opportunity. She...
