*STARRED REVIEW At just three-and-a-half hours, Daniel Magariel's debut novel should be a quick listen – time-wise, that's obviously true – but be warned: this affecting, hypnotic tragedy will linger and haunt long after. Narrator Gibson Frazier – pitch-perfect in his characterization of the two abused brothers...
At 15 hours to find out whodunit (you'll probably guess early), howdunit (you'll need to wait for it), whydunit (well…? no spoilers!), we're talking commitment. A full cast (why don't producers reveal who's who?), including veterans Ari Fliakos and Edoardo Ballerini, with Scott Aiello, Michael...
Q&A with Thi Bui: Writer, Illustrator, Teacher On the cover of Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir is a perfect quote: “A book to break our heart and heal it,” blurbs fellow Vietnamese American refugee and 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction...
*STARRED REVIEW The morning after Mia and daughter Pearl return the rental key in the Richardsons' mailbox, the youngest Richardson, Izzy, sets "little fires everywhere," destroying the family home. Following her magnificent debut, Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng’s spectacular sophomore work again manipulates time...
In thrice voicing Linda Wallheim, the Mormon bishop’s murder-solving wife, Kirsten Potter has settled comfortably into a quixotic emotional range that can move from stiff politeness to philosophical musing to overwrought shrillness without much warning. Confronted with a third dead body – “How does this always...
*STARRED REVIEW Narrator Sartaj Garewal’s energy couldn’t be more rousingly infectious as he voices the unforgettable characters in Adiga’s (The White Tiger) latest. Raised in a Mumbai slum by a fiercely demanding father, the two Kumar brothers are destined to become cricket champions by the sheer...
*STARRED REVIEW Laurie Frankel’s third novel is her most personal: as the mother of a transgender daughter, she writes what she knows with clarity, truth, and heart. Rosie and Penn already have four sons when Claude arrives. A remarkable child by all accounts, by age 3,...
'The Leavers,' inspired by a real story, confronts transracial adoption “Everyone had stories they told themselves to get through the days,” Deming Guo muses the evening of his 22nd birthday, summing up a lifetime of leaving – and being left – that has defined his short...
Death brings “excitement ...
Tom Grendel can divide his 17-year-old life in "exactly three phases: before Mom, after Mom but before Dad/Iraq, and my current post-Dad/Iraq period." Tom's mother died suddenly when he was 9. His father deployed to Iraq, leaving Tom and his sister, Zipora, with their grandmother....
Nikki’s begrudging agreement to help her sister, Mindi, “find a husband the traditional way” takes her to Southall, a predominately South Asian immigrant neighborhood in west London, to post a discreet marriage advert at the gurdwara (Sikh temple). Unlike Mindi, Nikki considers herself modern and...
Annalee Ahlberg is missing, but given her history of sleepwalking, her loved ones hold fast to the possibility of her return. While the investigation remains ongoing, the family adheres to some semblance of normalcy: husband Warren retreats to his work as a professor, 21-year-old daughter...
Bei Dao is considered the most prominent of China’s “Misty Poets,” named for the abstract, opaque nature of their compositions written predominantly during the oppressive Cultural Revolution. In contrast, the language of Bei Dao’s memoir, seamlessly translated by fellow poet Yang, is elegantly simple and...
The Guy, the Girl, the Artist and His Ex opens with a real-life unsolved mystery: "On August 2, 1986, a group calling itself the Australian Cultural Terrorists stole one of the world's most iconic paintings – Picasso's Weeping Woman – off the walls of the...
*STARRED REVIEW “The Korean War displaced and fragmented more than ten million families,” writes Heinz Insu Fenkl in his introduction to his new translation of Yi’s novella about the first meeting between two adult brothers. Yi, one of Korea’s most prominent literary figures, and his family were...
News about the transgender community – including banned books, bathroom laws, hockey, wrestlers, models, parades, Jackie and Juliet Evancho, and, most tragically, a horrifying murder caught on cellphone video – have all made recent headlines. Books can be helpful, entertaining, illuminating portals into the trans*/gender nonconforming (GNC)...
Two young white men from disparate, dysfunctional family backgrounds meet in college, bond over an obsessive devotion to black music, and create an in-demand production studio in Brooklyn. Their pièce de résistance is a clever hoax: an outdoor recording of a singer that’s remixed to...
'Olive Witch' is the memoir of an outsider on a quest for belonging “bow echo,” the very first words of Abeer Y. Hoque’s raw, unblinking, urgent-in-these-times memoir, Olive Witch, is an easy-to-miss clue. Followed by a temperature (73°F) and what looks like a diary entry, the...
*STARRED REVIEW In rural North Dakota, Landreaux and Ravich are friends and neighbors, further bound by their wives who are half sisters. With a single gunshot, their lives change forever, when Landreaux aims at a buck at the edge of a field bordering both properties and...
*STARRED REVIEW Mary, Caroline, and Katie are three very different generations in the same family; finding themselves unexpectedly under the same roof forces them to confront a complicated past that has kept them estranged for decades. Mary is the grandmother, newly widowed, fighting the dementia that...
