*STARRED REVIEW While the Titanic and Lusitania are both well-documented disasters, the single greatest tragedy in maritime history is the little-known 1945 sinking by Soviet torpedoes of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a German cruise liner that was supposed to ferry wartime personnel and refugees to safety. The...
*STARRED REVIEW When Connor's grandmother dies, she leaves his father a ring, a pair of pilot's wings, and a letter explaining that the man who raised Connor's father was not his biological father. With his father paralyzed by depression, Connor takes the two mementoes and the...
Even as Mercy Wong's father expects that she will marry the herbalist's son and be a "meek" wife, he also insists that she never stop learning because she must "be as smart as the white ghosts." In San Francisco's Chinatown in 1906, 15-year-old Mercy's graduation from...
*STARRED REVIEW Richard Chapman – husband, father, businessman – hosts a bachelor party in his Westchester, NY, home for his younger brother. Two strippers are hired to provide the expected entertainment, until the debauchery ends abruptly when the girls murder their bodyguards and flee. Richard must...
Zomorod Yousefzadeh hasn't "met anyone who has moved so many times before sixth grade." Her peripatetic upbringing has already encompassed long distances – not just in miles, but across cultural, social and political divides, as well. Originally from Abadan, Iran, her family moved to Compton,...
*STARRED REVIEW Many years earlier, Lucy Barton spent two months in a hospital after a routine appendectomy; no one ever figured out what was wrong. She wakes one morning to find her mother sitting on her bed, arrived in Manhattan from their rural Illinois hometown. Too many...
*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...
*STARRED REVIEW "I was taught to avoid showing off," Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson (writing, Columbia University; On Michael Jackson) begins. "But isn't all memoir a form of showing off?" That hesitation permeates throughout, the restraint perfectly mimicked in Robin Miles's elegant recitation. This work is a...
“A house. A writing machine. …[And her] animals” are the “home” Sandra Cisneros needs to “feel like writing.” The MacArthur “Genius”-author of The House on Mango Street – one of those celebrated pivotal titles readers never forget – offers the “stories from my life [that]...
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...
Here’s a ‘did you know …?’-fact about the Smithsonian Museums … they’re all free, all the time. That’s not the case in many museums around the country, so the Smithsonian created Museum Day Live!, an annual event in which participating museums across the country open...
Alternate histories have been "a thing" for decades. Lauded titles are many, but World War II-related novels in which the so-called good guys don't win seem to have yielded quite a few bestsellers through the decades, including The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, Fatherland...
Grimm’s familiar tale gets a Southwestern rendering in Caldecott Honor-winner Eric A. Kimmel’s retelling, with “the best tortillas” as the golden standard. Señora Gonzalez boasts that her daughter Rosalia’s tortillas “are so light, they float like clouds.” The town’s richest man, Don Ignacio, summons Rosalia...
Originally published in 2004, then 23-year-old Uzodinma Iweala’s debut novel – which began as the author's Harvard senior thesis under the direction of Jamaica Kincaid – reappears 11 years later in two additional incarnations: as an acclaimed film directed by Cory Fukunaga and this mesmerizing...
*STARRED REVIEW This is not your ordinary Hollywood memoir: no script doctor or publicist seems to have embellished or sanitized Tony/Emmy/Obie/Golden Globe-winning actress Mary-Louise Parker's first book. Written as a series of letters to almost three dozen "Mr."s both real and imagined, Parker's work captures past...
'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 –...
At age 6, Özge Samanci was desperate to be "on the other side of the binoculars" – that is, to be at school, being watched by her mother from across the street, just as she and her mother occasionally spotted and waved at her older sister Pelin,...
‘In Other Words’ traces Jhumpa Lahiri's love affair with the Italian language A few days before Christmas 1994, Jhumpa Lahiri made her first trip to Italy. She left a week later, in “[l]ove at first sight” not with a person, but with the Italian language. Over...
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...
'The Expatriates' explores three overlapping lives in Hong Kong While Janice Y.K. Lee’s The Expatriates might be one of your first reads of this new year, you will not be allowed to forget this book as 2016 draws to a close. Mark my words: The Expatriates...
