*STARRED REVIEW "My brothers and I became fishermen in January of 1996 after our father moved out of Akure, a town in the west of Nigeria, where we had lived together all our lives," explains nine-year-old Benjamin. With Father's strict daily oversight missing and Mother busy with...
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...
For those of us of a certain (old) age, we might remember an animated rabbit used to sell artificially colored, chemically flavored powder that altered milk into some sort of sweet goop: Quiky the Quik Bunny would quip "You can't drink it slow, if it's Quik."...
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...
Volume 1 promised "This is the beginning of a new age" on its intriguing cover page. And yep, did it ever deliver – for oldster-fans delirious with gleeful nostalgia and a brand new generation of young 'uns lucky to discover this hero-version-2.0! Yes, indeedy, Ultraman is...
*STARRED REVIEW While Gillian Flynn’s high-flying Gone Girl hasn't wandered far from bestsellers lists, the wait is on for what she'll publish next. She's reportedly working on a delayed new novel – a murder set in the Midwest – and has signed on with the Hogarth Shakespeare...
*STARRED REVIEW If a picture is worth a thousand words, what does it mean when paintings start morphing, shifting, and even weeping actual tears? For Sierra Santiago, who thought she would spend her summer making the mural of her dreams, these newly moving pictures are clear warnings...
Avatar Aang takes a temporary narrative back seat to his Fire Lord buddy Zuko in Part One of the newest Last Airbender three-part installment. Now that Zuko has been reunited with his long-lost mother Ursa [you'll need to read The Search for the full backstory], he's bringing...
Because she “can no longer idly sit by and consume the Little White Lies that [her] parents tell,” Coretta channels her frustration into a debut blog post about power, politics, mixed-race identity, Afros, and Rosa Parks. The blog goes viral, and Coretta’s 4.0, extracurriculars, college...
'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...
The single-page "author's note" which introduces this stupendous, otherwise-wordless wonder is a full story unto itself: Guojing reveals her lonely childhood growing up in 1980s China under the one-child policy. Her parents worked, and she was often cared for by her grandmother. But sometimes when...
*STARRED REVIEW Faced with financial crisis, college professor Kyung Cho and his wife, Gillian, are considering selling their overmortgaged home. During the initial realtor meeting, the couple discovers Kyung's mother wandering disoriented and naked beyond their backyard. Kyung misunderstands his mother's garbled Korean – the language she...
*STARRED REVIEW Rhimes has become one of television's most powerful women – her ShondaLand production company owns Thursday night with Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and How To Get Away with Murder. But career success aside, Rhimes is an introvert who was perfectly happy turning down most of...
*STARRED REVIEW Jonas and Wyatt entered the world as identical twin boys, adopted by Kelly and Wayne Maines after being born to Kelly's teenage cousin who wasn't ready to be a mother. By toddlerhood, Wyatt vocalized that she was a girl; Jonas always recognized he had...
Mothers, you will relate. Meet your bluntly honest children. Ask your little one a question about yourself – all the while hoping for a smidge of uplifting compliment or encouraging understanding – and what you'll probably get is not exactly what you anticipated. You've been warned! These little wonders just aren't capable of...
Korean narratives of disconnect and ennui arriving Stateside in recent translations seem to be on the verge of becoming an imported genre. Noteworthy titles over the past few years include Young-ha Kim's I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, Kyung Ran Jo's Tongue, and the forthcoming The Vegetarian by...
"I believe that art is an essential element of revolution," Leila Abdelrazaq begins her "Artist Statement" on her website. She's half Palestinian and half American activist based in Chicago with a 2015 DePaul University degree who has generations of stories to share. Her Baddawi began as a webcomic "...
To become a writer, Yiyun Li left behind everything familiar: her birth country (China), her first language (Mandarin), her family (parents and sister), her scientific training (immunology), and her PhD degree (University of Iowa). On the other side of the world, she switched into the...
*STARRED REVIEW Han Kang, a South Korean writing professor with Iowa Writers Workshop training, makes her English-translation debut with this spare, spectacular novel, in which a multigenerational, seemingly traditional Seoul family implodes. Yeong-hye, the youngest of three adult children, repeatedly announces "I had a dream," violent, bloody,...
