Julie Doucet is a legendary alternative comics pioneer, especially in an arena dominated by men. Her fame was further elevated by her frustrated abandonment of the industry in 2006. Her semi-autobiographical Dirty Plotte (quite the double entendre: "plotte" is Québécois slang for the c-word) began as...
Fourteen voices (each embodying a specific poetic form!) – enlivened by 14 performers – take turns bearing witness in this novel in verse. Perspectives shift among the enslavers, the enablers to such inhumanity, their victims, and their descendants, revealing decades from capture to post-Civil War...
Veteran narrator Hillary Huber (soon to hit 700 credits) seems exactly in her element in embodying Hannah Lillith Assadi’s (Sonora, 2017) elegiac second novel of devolving connections, recalled through the scattering memories of an aging woman facing dementia. Once upon a time, Elle was madly in...
*STARRED REVIEW Ladee Hubbard (The Rib King) showcases the same brilliant, biting insight of her novels in an expert debut short story collection, The Last Suspicious Holdout. She builds an indelible Black community through 13 interlinked stories, mostly set in an unnamed "suburbia of the south." She...
*STARRED REVIEW Familiar joy is immediate as one reenters Don Lee’s signature worlds of brilliant resonance and quiet depth. In his first short story collection since his lauded Yellow debut, Lee again questions identity, unlikely relationships, and fleeting connections. “Truth was a collection of falsehoods,” Lee’s filmmaker...
Multi-disciplinary artist and writer Vivek Shraya (The Subtweet, 2020) continues her thoughtful, deliberate self-narrations. Her latest essay collection centers change: “If I were to have anything resembling a higher purpose, I’d now say that it’s to evolve and to model evolution. To demonstrate the beauty...
Gerda Saunders, who wrote Memory’s Last Breath (2017), an exquisitely bittersweet record chronicling her experiences with dementia, is one of my most beloved friends. We have books in common, in that we find great solace and escape in the (well-)written word. Inspired by our last visit...
Melissa Chadburn's electrifying debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, opens with gruesome death: "Dying hurts like f*ck-all everything." The description comes from "Aswang," a shape-shifting creature of Filipinx folklore, who knows "about the slow agonies of death" because she reanimates the body of 18-year-old Marina,...
Cristina Rivera Garza, one of Mexico's most important contemporary authors, is progressively gaining renown in the U.S. (where she's lived since 1989) and has won a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship and a 2020 National Book Critics Circle finalist nod in Criticism. Indie press Dorothy's release of New...
*STARRED REVIEW Mention of Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club sets this novel in 1999, when Oh San turns 23 that summer. She left her childhood village years ago, haunted by the memory of a best friendship’s wrenching cleaving. After being repeatedly abandoned by her mother,...
Award-winning Italian writer Donatella Di Pietrantonio made her English-language debut with the lauded A Girl Returned, deftly translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (revered for her elegant Elena Ferrante translations). Author and translator return to the characters from their earlier collaboration with A Sister’s Story, another...
*STARRED REVIEW French graphic creator Fabien Toulmé opens the second of three volumes featuring Syrian refugee Hakim and his extended family with a clever recap of the first entry, facilitated by Toulmé’s young daughter, who asks to accompany him for the next interview: Toulmé lays out...
The mutable, esoteric art world is again the setting for award-winning Argentinian María Gainza’s latest, deftly translated by British writer-editor Thomas Bunstead, who also English-enabled her award-winning Optic Nerve (2019). Gainza’s narrator warns early on, “Any person reading this ought not to expect names, numbers,...
*STARRED REVIEW Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf is a crystalline collection by defiant Moroccan writer Malika Moustadraf (Wounds of the Soul and the Body), who died in 2006 at 37. Moustadraf's piercing 14 stories here, which challenge patriarchal expectations of gender and sexuality,...
Polyglot Yoko Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and German, introduced an ursine character named Knut in Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016) and opens her newest import with a same-named protagonist. Whether or not the two are related seems unlikely, yet in Tawada’s fascinating tale,...
*STARRED REVIEW In addition to Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s standalone Marina (2015), Daniel Weyman previously narrated The Labyrinth of the Spirits, considered the finale to the internationally bestselling Cemetery of Forgotten Books series. Weyman – his continuity is especially affecting – returns for Ruiz Zafón’s posthumous collection of...
*STARRED REVIEW In Thank You, Mr. Nixon, her second irresistible collection of short fiction, Gish Jen (The Resisters) showcases 11 intricately linked stories spanning the East and West over a half-century. The titular opening story is a letter recalling the U.S. president's 1972 visit to China that...
Canadian cartoonist/illustrator Adam de Souza gathers three previously published zines – ish (2017), and so you write it down (2018), and coda (2021) – to forge a loose journey confronting devastating loss and subsequent attempts at moving forward. In a narrative divided into brief vignettes, de Souza initially presents...
Morgan Thomas's profound debut, Manywhere, is partly dedicated to "anyone who's gone looking for themself in the archives." In nine remarkable stories, Thomas adamantly and sublimely commits four centuries of the genderqueer/trans existence to the page. In "The Daring Life of Philippa Cook the Rogue,"...
Greek mythology's princess Cassandra was given the power of prophecy, but when she refused the advances of the god Apollo, she was cursed forever with disbelief. Millennia later, a slight, blond 10-year-old in Cienfuegos, Cuba, insists, "I don't want to be this Raúl, I want...
