*STARRED REVIEW Corinne Manning’s author statement couldn’t be clearer. “I had no idea how to write authentically until the day when I typed the sentence ‘Oh, f*ck it. I’m writing lesbian fiction.’” That declaration became “Gay Tale,” one of 11 stories in this collection, her first,...
After a decade together, Oscar and Mina married, but on their wedding night, Mina downed all the pills she could find, yet somehow lived. Six months later, she’s walking across George Washington Bridge. She’s already sent one of her purple flip-flops into the dark below...
*STARRED REVIEW Earth’s destruction, space inhabitation, time travel – none of that is unfamiliar. Rampant capitalism, workaholic isolation, and family bonds too can be pedestrian themes. Yet Simon Jimenez’s debut, which includes all of the above, is a remarkably fresh, electrifying story that, at its core,...
Prolifically published in his native Farsi, Amir Ahmadi Arian makes his English-language debut with Then the Fish Swallowed Him, a disturbingly irresistible novel exposing the invalidity of truth and lies under a despotic regime. Growing up in a volatile, politically fractured society and losing both parents...
*STARRED REVIEW How can a story so harrowing, so wrenching be so gorgeous? In her third novel exquisitely translated by award-winning Geoffrey Strachan, Mauritius-born journalist and translator Nathacha Appanah (Waiting for Tomorrow, 2018) presents the beginning and dissolution of a boy, Moïse, and all the people...
“The invisibility of the women, in particular of my community, fueled this desire to write the Dominican experience, the Latinx experience, the immigrant experience, the New York experience,” reveals Angie Cruz in an interview accessible only if you choose audio. Making her narrator debut, fellow...
Filling a Lack of Voices from Inside Việt Nam: Talking with Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai Thousands of Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s devoted readers should have been meeting her live over these next few weeks to hear about The Mountains Sing, her first novel in English. But an unprecedented...
*STARRED REVIEW “I did not live with intent, I only lived. But that’s all over now.” Kazu is dead, but his spirit can’t rest. As he wanders through Tokyo’s Imperial Gift Park – where he last lived as a homeless wanderer – memories, visions, and hauntings...
*STARRED REVIEW The U.S.’s April, 1975, withdrawal from Vietnam enabled the so-called Vietnam War to spread into Laos and Cambodia, where Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime stormed Phnom Penh and dispersed its inhabitants – mostly to brutal labor camps – eliminating 1.7 to 2 million Cambodians....
Chen Hang is facedown in the bathtub when his wife, Jia Jia, discovers his naked corpse. Married for four years, their intended “lifelong partnership” didn’t include love, at least not for each other. After vomiting her “insuppressible resentment and disgust,” Jia Jia finds a pencil...
*STARRED REVIEW Ishmael Beah, who recounted his brutal experiences as a child soldier in Sierra Leone in his bestselling memoir, A Long Way Gone (2007), understands all too well the horrors that can befall children. Here his fictional “little family” numbers five, the two oldest still...
In 1935, two unlikely tweens are connected across the Atlantic as assigned – albeit initially unwilling – pen pals. Made to write a full page to Charlie after dismissing her because she's a girl, Alex soon succumbs to her epistolary charms; their letters continue for...
*STARRED REVIEW As former travel and culture editor for CNN in Seoul, U.S.-Hong Kong-South Korea-raised and Brooklyn-domiciled Frances Cha writes exactingly of what she knows in her first novel. With unblinking focus, she confronts some of the darkest consequences of contemporary gender inequity by targeting the...
Beijing-born, globally-trotted, San Francisco-domiciled C. Pam Zhang “is still looking for home,” her author bio shouts. That search for home – uncertain, elusive, just-out-of-reach – looms throughout Zhang’s mesmerizing debut novel in which a family of four (which should have been five) never quite arrives....
Fan Fiction, 50 Years Later Almost two decades have passed since Linda Sue Park became the first Korean American – and only the second Asian American – to win the Newbery Medal, in 2002 for A Single Shard. She's since published dozens of titles (Gondra's Treasure; Forest of...
“We have to learn from history and stop repeating its mistakes” As the child of two Chinese refugees, Helen Zia can personally speak to the effects of displacement, separation, adaptation, and reinvention. In her memorable career as activist/journalist/writer/Asian American icon, Zia turns inward for the first time in...
*STARRED REVIEW The story might sound familiar – the 1991 L.A. riots – but Steph Cha ("Juniper Song" series) alchemizes headlines into a riveting thriller about two families colliding over injustice, while narrators Glenn Davis and Greta Jung transform the written word into mesmerizing performances. Shawn Matthews...
Japan’s literary superstar Mieko Kawakami (Ms Ice Sandwich, 2018) significantly expands her 2008 Akutagawa Prize novella, notably translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd. Her writer-wannabe protagonist’s names are prescient homages: Natsuko (summer child) references poet Ichiyō Higuchi, aka Natsuko Higuchi, who appears on the...
For Allie Abraham, "hiding is easy: reddish-blond hair, pale skin, hazel eyes," in other words – white. That she looks "textbook Circassian…from the Caucasus region. (Hey, they don't call it Caucasian for nothing)," is her ethnic inheritance from her immigrant Circassian Jordanian history professor father....
*STARRED REVIEW British TV-film-stage-even-video-games-actor/comedian/novelist Stephen Fry is a consummate storyteller. Yes, he’s got multiple bestsellers on the page, including this latest: choosing from the godly Greek pantheon certainly provided divine inspiration, replete with the utmost in family dysfunction including bed-hopping (although, who needs beds?!), Sisyphean feats...
