Yiyun Li’s fiction since her son’s tragic suicide seems to have catapulted her away from the Asian roots that define her earlier award-winning fiction. Her latest begins on a pastoral farm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where Agnès, known as the “French bride,” lives with her husband...
Cicatrix, or scar, encompasses multilayered meanings in queer, Manila-based artist Elle’s U.S. debut. They begin with “a firm bump … just below [their] left ear, about the diameter of a five-peso coin” – and a confession that “every time I get sick, I always think...
*STARRED REVIEW Initially serialized in Japan between 1981 and 1984, this is considered the late Yamada Murasaki’s most famous work; it’s also her first to arrive in the U.S., translated by notable manga historian Ryan Holmberg. Decades since its introduction, the slice-of-home-life bildungsroman remains hauntingly relevant...
Conrad needs help. He’s suffering from a fatal disease, and mitigating the excruciating agony is all he can do. Ignacio seems to be his only hope, navigating him through the Manila streets where humans – and other beings – pass between worlds. Beyond the last...
Tokyo-based author/artist Erika Kobayashi makes an intriguing, albeit uneven, translated-into-English debut, enabled by Canadian Brian Bergstrom. The consequences of Japan’s 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster are manifest in three generations of an all-female Tokyo family. Kobayashi’s novel takes place on a single day, following the schedule...
*STARRED REVIEW Novelist Reema Patel and narrator Lavanya Gandhi prove ideally paired, symbiotically making their debuts. Patel, a Toronto lawyer with experience in Mumbai’s human-rights legal sector, draws on her experiences to create Rakhi, a 23-year-old office assistant at Justice for All. Rakhi caught the attention of...
*STARRED REVIEW Debut author Belinda Huijuan Tang's immigrant father is a gregarious storyteller, especially about his rural Chinese upbringing, but he has one story he's never been able to finish, about his lost father. Tang empathically transforms that incomplete memory into her exquisite novel, A Map for...
Nina, Silvia, and Shirin’s “now-mythical friendship origin story” began at NYU in their freshman writing workshop. As the only Asian Americans, they initially avoided each other, until a class trip to the New York Public Library led to a coincidental bathroom break that led to...
Lio Min's soulful debut novel, Beating Heart Baby, highlights music, art, and the love of family – by birth, yes, but more significantly by circumstance and choice. Their emotive narrative spotlights Filipino American artist Santi and Korean Japanese American musician Suwa, playing out a tumultuous relationship...
*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, Banana Yoshimoto (born 1964) debuted as one of Japan’s youngest literary phenoms. In the decades since, she continues to produce brilliantly relevant fiction, notable for an open, accessible simplicity that belies revelatory observations about life, love, happiness, and more. Her latest...
*STARRED REVIEW Award-winning Noah Van Sciver shares in his author’s note he was born into an LDS family descended from a husband of Brigham Young’s daughter, Elizabeth. After his parents’ divorce when he was 12, he began to learn “about Joseph Smith and everything that [his]...
Narrator Malik Rashad isn’t quite Kwame Onwuachi, who ideally narrated his original 2019 memoir – but here, that’s not necessarily a liability for younger audiences who might need a smidge more animation. Rashad affectingly channels Onwuachi, the self-described “black kid from the Bronx ...
“This is the book I wish I had as a teenager,” disability rights activist Alice Wong reveals, choosing 17 stories for this adaptation from the 37 in her 2020 original. As editor, Wong again reads her introduction. While none could dispute that Wong is a...
*STARRED REVIEW Bird is 12. Home is a 10th-floor dorm apartment without a working elevator. His Harvard professor father has been demoted to clerical duties at the library. Since his mother, Margaret, left three years ago, Bird is called Noah, anything to disassociate from her since she’s...
*STARRED REVIEW “Indians. We are so often imagined, but so infrequently well understood,” Anton Treuer’s opening sentence reads. As a Princeton-educated, Ojibwe professor with “one foot in the wigwam and one in the ivory tower,” Treuer “cannot speak for all Indians,” but he’s ready with “specific...
*STARRED REVIEW The prologue alone to Luke Healy's sharp, skilled The Con Artists is a wow-inducing example of show-don't-tell genius. "Oh, hello. I'm Luke Healy, the author of this book. No big deal," he modestly introduces himself. As he reads "a prepared statement" – the usual "entirely...
Bracing cultural criticism flows from the pen of Elaine Castillo Provocative and pointed literary criticism in How to Read Now: Essays challenges people to become better, smarter readers. Boundless erudition and eloquent exasperation define Elaine Castillo’s debut nonfiction, How to Read Now, an incandescent collection of essays...
The nearly 15 years Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi spent writing and rewriting proves to be tenacity well invested, resulting in her audacious debut, Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions: A Novel in Interlocking Stories. The 10 chapters here work as standalone pieces (many were previously published in...
Until her death at 104 in 2018, Dovey Johnson Roundtree—“a Black woman born in the early twentieth century in the Jim Crow South” – shared a remarkable 24-year friendship with Katie McCabe, a self-described “white woman who came of age in 1950s Washington, DC.” Theirs...
Over a decade and a half after its 2005 publication, the young readers edition of historian/journalist/music critic Jeff Chang’s seminal Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation seems almost overdue. The enhanced collaboration with historian/journalist/professor Dave "Davey D" Cook adds new generations...
