Kong Deok-geun is an “average administrative worker,” a position for which he surpassed 137 applicants for “a job that has no work.” His boredom, so severe that he’s named it “I-would-rather-eat-dog-treats-than-suffer-this-boredom,” sends him to the fourth floor, where he discovers Cabinet 13, then spends an...
“I want to write a novel that will allow young people who are tired of living to have a break from their own lives.” This is the starting point for Eto Mori’s tale, first published in Japan in 1998 and now a classic. Issues challenging...
*STARRED REVIEW Bestselling Korean author Bora Chung is a genre-defying polyglot. She’s a Yale MA-ed, Indiana University PhD-ed translator of Russian and Polish modern literature into Korean who writes an amalgam of speculative, ghostly, literary horror fiction. Her glorious anglophone debut, enabled by award-winning Anton Hur,...
Nothing is quite what it seems – of course – in prodigious Helen Oyeyemi’s latest. The “starry-eyed young couple,” Otto and Xavier Shin, have committed to sharing the same last name without marrying. They’re embarking on a “non-honeymoon honeymoon” on a train trip gifted by...
Seven stimulating short stories, plus a pithy "reflection" on breasts, comprise Kim Bo-Young's collection On the Origin of Species and Other Stories, translated from the Korean by Joungmin Lee Comfort and Sora Kim-Russell. Lauded as one of Korea's most prominent science fiction writers, Kim insists her...
As impressive as Kim Bo-Young's intriguing stories are, their literary provenance is equally entertaining. "I wrote 'I'm Waiting for You' for one person to read and one person to hear, with no ambitions of it ever being published," Kim reveals in her author's note. An...
With echoes of themes in his internationally lauded Never Let Me Go (2005) – that life can be manufactured, bartered, bought – Booker-ed, Nobel-ed, and knighted Kazuo Ishiguro presents a bittersweet fable about the human heart as “[s]omething that makes each of us special and...
For Naoki Urasawa newbies, his latest collection (another satisfying English translation by popular manga-specialist John Werry) is a beckoning introductory primer. For aficionados, these eight stories (none titled “Sneeze”), originally published between 1995-2018, are an affirming reminder of his irrefutable genius. Urasawa’s most memorable stories feature...
*STARRED REVIEW Yes, indubitably, you’ll need to first read/listen to An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (2018) to fully appreciate April’s resurrection, why/how we’re not alone, the need to save humanity despite, well, humans. While Kristen Sieh helmed Hank Green’s bestselling debut almost solo – Green himself did a...
*STARRED REVIEW On the eve of her 19th birthday – which is also New Year's Eve – Oona is having the celebration of her life, madly in love, about to embark on a dream-come-true band tour. But when she awakes, she's jumped forward in time to...
We Had No Rules by Corinne Manning Corinne Manning’s author statement couldn’t be clearer: “I had no idea how to write authentically until the day when I typed the sentence ‘Oh, f*ck it. I’m writing lesbian fiction.’” That declaration became “Gay Tale,” one of 11 stories...
STARRED REVIEW Sixteen hours. Multiple layers of convoluted narrative. A vast cast in need of distinct distinguishing by age, gender, social standing, ethnicity, region, accent. Who you gonna call? Already a proven collaborator after The Golden-House (2017) and Shame (audio 2017), Adam returns as Rushdie’s voice-of-choice for his latest meandering...
*STARRED REVIEW A woman goes out for her regular evening walk on the beach, contemplating her relationship with her husband, until she sees a mermaid washed up on the shore. And here text and graphics suddenly diverge: the words reveal a recent affair, while the frames...
First-time-author Rita Woods shares the debut spotlight with her multi-faceted narrator Ella Turenne, who agilely ciphers the unique voices of four women who share one remarkable legacy. Turenne's present-day Gaelle is a Cleveland nursing home aide who survived the 2010 Haitian earthquake, and has recently...
*STARRED REVIEW Earth’s destruction, space inhabitation, time travel – none of that is unfamiliar. Rampant capitalism, workaholic isolation, and family bonds too can be pedestrian themes. Yet Simon Jimenez’s debut, which includes all of the above, is a remarkably fresh, electrifying story that, at its core,...
Lake Geneva in 1816 is home (in two rented properties) to five English travelers, three made eternal through their writing, one among that trio renowned for creating (inhuman) life, literally. Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein there, accompanied by her poet husband Percy Shelley, fellow poet Lord Byron,...
Best known for his brainy death-and-destruction mystery series featuring Detective Galileo and Detective Kaga, who have successfully arrived Stateside from Japan, Keigo Higashino reveals a softer side to his prolific imagination here. The Namiya General Store has been closed for decades, but three delinquent young men...
By 2142, “generations of interracial partnerships from the twenty-first century onward [have] rendered [names] meaningless” as markers of ethnicity. Time-traveling Agent Kin is named after quinoa; his fellow agent Markus Fernandez is a pale Brit/northern Californian. Author Mike Chen is Chinese American and channels Idris Elba...
Justine Eyre takes a voyage around and through the world, voicing three centuries of enigmatic, peripatetic characters in Pola Oloixarac’s genre-defying latest. Divided into three distinct sections, the epic – a mere five hours in duration but dense as multi-layered allegory – opens in the...
*STARRED REVIEW Ted Chiang, whose 1998 novella “Story of Your Life” (included in Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) became the Oscar-nominated film Arrival, returns with another intriguing collection comprised of seven previously published stories plus two new ones. Edoardo Ballerini voices four, Dominic Hoffman...
