Kirby Heyborne deploys his gentle charm to give voice to 12-year-old Walter Lavender Jr. who, owing to "a motor speech disorder," might seem mute to the outside world but has an imaginative soul that can't be silenced. Always an insightful observer, Walter is an unparalleled...
Japanese-born, Germany-based Tawada (Memoirs of a Polar Bear) writes facilely in both languages and creates incomparable award-winning fiction that defies easy labels. Tawada's latest in translation (smoothly rendered by Mitsutani, who also translated one of Tawada's earliest works, the three-storied The Bridegroom Was a Dog)...
*STARRED REVIEW Narrator Xe Sands delivers this Book with control, even detachment: the almost languid tone chillingly amplifies the hideous near-future Yuknavitch exposes in her highly anticipated follow-up to The Small Backs of Children. At 49, Christine is in her “last year until ascension,” an anachronistic term that...
The back cover insists ME “centers on the ‘It’s me’ telephone scam” in which a caller often targets the elderly, seeking funds to cover a false emergency. The ploy is more a brief narrative catalyst here; McDonald’s, in comparison, gets enough pagetime to make the novel occasionally...
Equal parts romance, fairy tale, horror, history, travelog, and treatise on the transformative power of storytelling, Indra Das’s debut combines a dual narrative about the developing relationship between two strangers with a fantastical tale set seemingly long ago. One December evening in Kolkata, Alok, a history...
"I wanted to write about girls and monsters, which has been a theme of mine from almost the start of my career — girls and giant monsters, and the supernatural," bestselling author Marjorie Liu told The Hollywood Reporter in a 2015 interview. "I wanted to...
Tokyo-born, Berlin-domiciled Yoko Tawada (Facing the Bridge, 2007) returns with another fantastical and entertaining novel that combines a broken family saga, socio-political-environmental enlightenment, a treatise on writing, and bitingly well-placed satire. Seamlessly translated from German by the award-winning Susan Bernofsky, Memoirs of a Polar Bear introduces...
Warning first: This is NOT NOT NOT for kids. For us old folks, however ...
As spring break begins, 17-year-old loner Araragi makes his only friend – and loses his humanity. Araragi is befuddled by class president Hanekawa's sudden attention, and his conversation with her about a vampire sighting doesn't sink in until he helps a dying limbless woman, only...
As narratives go, little happens in Jung Young Moon's latest translated-into-English title: unable to sleep, the protagonist considers writing a story, but not before he prevents a possible robbery. The unknown fate of the fallen thief sparks his imagination to cite memories (a break-up, a...
Wacky and weird, writing and literature professor Sequoia Nagamatsu’s fiction debut is a 12-piece collection that defies easy categorization as an amalgam of sci-fi/fantasy, horror, and black comedy overlaid with ancient-to-contemporary Japanese myth and culture. Nagamatsu’s atypical characters include the “Margaret Mead of the Kaiju [strange...
A Japanese manga artist lies feverish in a hotel bed, having arrived in Paris after attending an international comics festival in Spain. His plans to spend five days in the City of Lights before returning to Tokyo are temporarily waylaid, haunted by “alarming thoughts … like...
Primrose Heights is home to only three Asian Americans: 12-year-old Chloe Cho and her parents. In spite of Chloe's growing interest in her Korean heritage, her astrophysicist mother and fish store-owner father remain consistently mum about the family's past, always hedging with excuses like "Talking...
"A girl cannot be brave, or clever, or skilled as a boy can. If she is not good, she is nothing," an angry Reverend Erasmus Sunderly admonished his usually obedient 14-year-old-daughter, Faith. His words are harsh, but in Victorian England, not without societal support. He...
Sibling rivalry threatens to destroy the Fire Nation when a frustrated Zuko reveals the kemurikage leader on the first page: "I know that's you ...
*STARRED REVIEW At 16, Binti embarks on an interplanetary voyage to Oomza Uni, the galaxy's supreme institution of higher learning. As the first of her people offered such an opportunity, she leaves home without even warning her family of her departure. When the vessel is attacked by...
Alternate histories have been "a thing" for decades. Lauded titles are many, but World War II-related novels in which the so-called good guys don't win seem to have yielded quite a few bestsellers through the decades, including The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, Fatherland...
