In her newest story collection, May-lee Chai (Useful Phrases for Immigrants, 2018) shifts dexterously between the personal and the fantastical. Four of the eight stories feature autobiographical stand-ins who are, like Chai, the daughter of a Chinese father and white mother whose formative years are defined...
JJ Bola opens with a shocking promise: “I quit my job; I am taking my life savings, $9,021, and when it runs out, I am going to kill myself.” Nigerian British actor Oseloka Obi commands immediate attention in his debut narration in a solo adult...
From the particular to the universal: Cross-cultural stories A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times by Ethiopian American writer Meron Hadero highlights immigrant stories of dislocation and identity. Displacement – often by outside force, rarely by personal choice – haunts Meron Hadero’s superb debut short story...
Prolific, perennially youthful-voiced Cassandra Morris channels her infectious energy for Kyle Lukoff’s (Too Bright to See) newest vivacious protagonist, Annabelle, of Tahoma Falls, a small town just 40 minutes (but distinctly far) from Seattle. As a sixth grader, she’s about to start her final year at...
*STARRED REVIEW Once more, internationally bestselling Sayaka Murata confronts unspeakable topics with quotidian calm, shockingly convincing logic, and creepy humor in a dozen genre-defying stories, translated again by her chosen, Japanese-to-English enabler, Ginny Tapley Takemori. Death is no longer an ending, full stop, in “A First-Rate Material,”...
Terry Hong, Booklist Contributing Reviewer and chair of the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence selection committee, had questions for Tom Lin, winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for his first novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu. Here is their conversation: So as a debut novelist in your...
*STARRED REVIEW Relationships between women – familial, beloved, strange, imagined – dominate queer Taiwanese American K-Ming Chang’s (Bestiary, 2020) explosive and bizarre first story collection. Three single-word, deftly exacting descriptors define three sections – “Mothers,” “Myths,” “Moths” – which organize 16 tales that challenge immigration and...
Readers familiar with Lyla Lee's exuberant YA debut, I'll Be the One, will be tickled to see that singer/dancer Skye Shin is "topping the charts" in Lee's equally ebullient sophomore YA novel, Flip the Script. Like Skye, Lee's new protagonist, Hana Jin, is a Korean American...
*STARRED REVIEW Okay, Anne Tyler devotees and newbies (are there any?): settle in for another utterly engrossing multi-generational saga of Baltimoreans (who scatter), gently, absorbingly read by versatile Kimberly Farr. In her third iteration as Tyler’s cipher, Farr effortlessly adapts to Tyler’s distinct phrasings and rhythms,...
*STARRED REVIEW Editors Nicole Chung (All You Can Ever Know, 2018) and Matt Ortile (The Groom Will Keep His Name, 2020) present 30 essays that reveal how diverse bodies “move within (and against) expectations of race, gender, health, and ability.” Gabrielle Bellot, a Black trans woman,...
The empowering delight of Emiko Jean’s Tokyo Ever After continues in Tokyo Dreaming as Her Imperial Highness Princess Izumi tries to fit into an ancient hierarchy. When the second book opens, Izumi and her mother are ensconced in Tokyo's Tōgū Palace with their somewhat malodorous pup, Tamagotchi, who's been...
Three boys – Youssef, Iseul, Dayo – are born in Saudi Arabia in 1990. Their distant fathers – from Pakistan, Korea, Nigeria – are Muslim students at the University of Markab, where they meet Salim, who will become the boys’ adoptive father. Salim flees Saudi...
*STARRED REVIEW Sneha Mathan returns for her third outstanding collaboration with Thrity Umrigar, their shared Indian heritage again enhancing their author/narrator symbiosis. Accents, genders, ages, backgrounds, and emotions abound, but Mathan embraces diverse characterizations with effortless ease. In a remote Indian village, a young Hindu widow has...
Sa-i-gu (Korean for 4-2-9 as in April 29, 1992) was a defining moment in Korean American history, when 2,300-plus Korean-owned businesses were destroyed in the Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of Rodney King’s brutal arresting officers. Actor John Cho makes his fiction debut with...
In Tahiti, Tenaho is one of those “quartiers nobody ever hears about,” but what happened to that family “with too many kids ...
*STARRED REVIEW In 1960s Australia (not so unlike in the U.S.), the laws allow Aboriginal communities to be openly mistreated, their movements restricted, and their humanity denied. Lauded Australian Indigenous writer Tony Birch explores his country’s complex racist history through three generations of brown women, centering...
*STARRED REVIEW To best appreciate this volume, readers must go back to the first book. Pornsak Pichetshote’s exquisite narration is an intricate temporal puzzle, his scenes moving between past and present, revealing just enough partial (scintillating, shocking, shrewd) backstory each time with many threads that require careful...
Jamie Ford (Love and Other Consolation Prizes, 2017) showcases “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance” – inheriting trauma through generations – in another multi-temporal narrative spanning two-and-a-half centuries across the globe. Ford deftly reveals seven women’s lives, beginning with progenitor Afong, “the first Chinese woman to set foot...
Travis Dandro made his graphic title debut with award-winning King of King Court (2019), about his complicated 1980s youth. In this follow-up, he’s a Camaro-driving teenager in 1991 in his final year at home before art school. His heroin-addicted birth father has committed suicide and his...
Debut author Emma Grove's luminous graphic memoir opens with a declaration: "None of the following incidents are made up or invented ...
