*STARRED REVIEW Jokha Altharthi makes literary history as the first female Omani author to be translated into English and as author of the first novel written in Arabic to win the Man Booker International Prize. She shares that extraordinary success with translator and Oxford professor Marilyn...
When violent unrest arrives in Syria, Jude’s family is cleaved in half as she and her pregnant mother leave behind her father and older brother to live with her uncle’s family in Ohio. Jude perseveres with English, an unfamiliar (sometimes unwelcoming) culture, establishing new friendships,...
*STARRED REVIEW In 2014, a quarter-century after the 1988 death of filmmaker/playwright/writer/activist Kathleen Collins at 46 of breast cancer, indie distributor Milestone Films reintroduced her groundbreaking 1982 movie, Losing Ground, one of the first films written and directed by an African American woman, inspiring new interest in the...
Best known for her canonic, autobiographical short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and her nonfiction declaration, Women and Economics, Charlotte Perkins Gilman remains one of history’s greatest feminists. Written in 1915, Herland was initially serialized in Gilman’s own magazine, The Forerunner, but didn’t appear in book-form until 1979. That she...
In April 2017, 41-year-old Park died of stomach cancer. His sophomore title was published 17 months later, aided by a close friend for over two decades, the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld, who played a significant role in deciphering Park’s final handwritten notes in order to get...
This is the first of a two-part series. Part II will publish on Friday, August 30, 2019. Before I can name even a single author or title, I must express my constantly regenerating, overflowing gratitude to translators who enable readers anywhere and everywhere to literally experience the...
The miracles were many: “born poor and blind in Vietnam on the losing side of a bloody civil war,” Julie Yip-Williams survived her grandmother’s demand to have her killed, escaped on a leaky boat with her family to Hong Kong, arrived as a refugee in...
*STARRED REVIEW A broken-down car on a rural Argentinian road brings together two unlikely father-and-teen pairs. Reverend Pearson should have listened to daughter Leni's warnings about their overused jalopy, but its failure lands them in the garage of El Gringo Brauer and his assistant, Tapioca. Pearson...
The unnamed narrator is 13, raised by two affectionate parents in a comfortable city home where she has her own room. School, swim and dance lessons, a nearby best friend, the sea a short walk away are the life she's known. And then, one August...
In Milani’s graphic biography of the iconic Marie Curie, soon-to-be Nobel winner Ernest Rutherford explains the theory of transmutation in less than a dozen panels to Marie Curie’s “interested in science” daughter, Irène – so young, she calls it “tramputation.” That transparent accessibility repeats throughout,...
Happy final Friday of Pride Month. Wow . . . that went by quickly! I have 25 (no lie!) more books on, under, next to, and all around my desk that I will not be covering here, which is actually a good thing, because that’s proof that...
*STARRED REVIEW Candice Carty-Williams and Shvorne Marks are quite the dynamic duo: a debut novelist gets paired with a first-time narrator for spectacular results. Hailed (rather lazily) as the black Bridget Jones, Queenie decidedly deserves center-stage without expedient comparisons. As a Jamaican British 25-year-old Londoner, Queenie’s...
Debut novelist Maria Kuznetsova gets paired with a first-time narrator, and the collaboration is – well, ideal. Like Kuznetsova’s titular heroine Oksana, Anna Kyra Hooton is a Russian American immigrant, arriving in the U.S. at 10, three years older than 7-year-old Oksana who moves from...
*STARRED REVIEW When the material is already so funny, adding another layer of guffaw-inducements hardly seems possible, until you’ve heard Helen Ellis narrate her own 23-essay collection. Alabama-born-and-raised, Manhattan-domiciled for decades, Ellis is not wrong when she insists, “Southern accents are disarming.” Here, as in the teaser-podcast that debuted...
“I’m still getting used to the idea of being a writer”: Q&A with Angie Kim True confession: A few years ago, our mutual friend, the writer Marie Myung-Ok Lee (not a Bloomer – Marie had a first-ever YA fiction multi-book deal with a major publisher in...
May is Asian Pacific American (APA) Heritage Month. Why May? The first Japanese people immigrated to the United States on May 7, 1843, and the transcontinental railroad – built mostly with immigrant Chinese labor – was completed on May 10, 1869. In 1977, Congressional legislation...
The eerie chill factor proves unrelenting throughout Sophie Mackintosh’s 2018 debut, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and is further intensified by three formidable narrators who take turns revealing the dissolution of an isolated, splintered family. Grace, Lia, and Sky are three daughters – their...
Since Jane Austen published Pride and Prejudice in 1813, hundreds of adaptations have followed, but Soniah Kamal is the first to set the affair in Pakistan, her birth country. Meet feisty girls’-school English-literature teacher Alys Binat and arrogant Valentine Darsee. The rest is ...
*STARRED REVIEW Given the evergreen veneration of Margaret Atwood’s dystopic classic that, since its 1985 publication, has spawned audio, film, radio, theater, opera, and ballet incarnations and, most recently, the wildly popular television series, this graphic novel was certainly inevitable. Canadian artist Reneé Nault is credited...
It's the first day of school again, and Emoni Santiago tells her young daughter Emma, more commonly called Babygirl, "make sure you're nice to the other kids and ...
