Talk about a new kind of family ...
*STARRED REVIEW Kevin Kwan’s third volume continues to expose – albeit with plenty of schadenfreudian humor – the outrageous excesses and over-the-top machinations that began with his debut, Crazy Rich Asians (currently in highly anticipated celluloid production). Lydia Look, who voiced book two, China Rich Girlfriend,...
One word describes Bae Suah's latest: enigmatic. The seven stories that comprise her first translated-into-English collection (and her third collaboration with prolifically adroit British translator of choice Smith) are more fragments than linear narratives. In the opening "First Snow, First Sight," unreliable memory between two...
The arrival of an unexpected package inspires Bea to begin writing her story, "in the hope that [she] could do it justice, and clear [her] conscience." Years earlier, she traveled to an unnamed Middle Eastern country (certainly inspired by Syria, where debut author Emily Robbins...
Batuman makes her fiction debut already a literary darling: a New Yorker staff writer since 2010 and the author of a much-adored essay collection, The Possessed, about the pleasurable intricacies of reading Russian literature. The year is 1995, and Turkish American 18-year-old Selin enters Harvard. She...
*STARRED REVIEW For Kyung-hee, a self-described "theatre actor specializing in recitation," the "roving life" proves to be the only antidote to "everything [being] irresolvably vague and depressing." Traveling through Europe and Asia, she shares experiences and memories with new acquaintances and more intimate friends. Wandering without...
Once adventurous Paolo de Padova has aged into the cautious first assistant to his cousin, the pope. Just before the Dalai Lama’s Vatican visit, His Holiness asks Paolo for a nearly impossible favor: to plan “an unofficial vacation” that includes the Dalai Lama. Initially Paolo thinks...
'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 Although separated from philandering husband Christopher for six months, a London woman agrees to continue to postpone "the process…of telling people." Almost a month has passed since she last talked to Christopher, rendering her unable to answer his mother Isabella's unexpected request for his...
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...
Out on a January walk in Berlin, the unnamed Korean narrator falls into a river. As she struggles to breathe, her experience gives way to both "conventional memories" of what has led her to this icy trap dovetailed with tenuous endeavors to comprehend and explicate...
In 1995 at age 22, MariNaomi leaves her boyfriend of five years, her job, her San Francisco home and transplants herself 50 miles south in San Jose, where she almost immediately "move[s] into an idyllic, century-old one bedroom cottage that rested on a large plot of untamed...
"[A]s a reporter, I was spending my life telling other people's stories and ignoring my own family's incredible one," Dawn Anahid MacKeen realized at 35. Her 78-year-old Armenian mother was aging, and MacKeen could no longer ignore her calls to "come home." In 2006, MacKeen left...
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...
*STARRED REVIEW At 28, Sara Lindqvist has more literary friends than real. She arrives in Iowa from Sweden, expecting to spend a few weeks with Amy Harris, an older woman with whom she's exchanged three years of intimate letters and books. Alas, she's arrived too late:...
“A house. A writing machine. …[And her] animals” are the “home” Sandra Cisneros needs to “feel like writing.” The MacArthur “Genius”-author of The House on Mango Street – one of those celebrated pivotal titles readers never forget – offers the “stories from my life [that]...
‘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...
Caldecott Medalist author/illustrator Allen Say introduced his personal portrait-of-an-artist-as-a-young-man in the one title he didn't illustrate, the autobiographical middle-grade novel, The Ink-Keeper's Apprentice, originally published in 1979. More than three decades later, in 2011, Say returned to his early artistic journey, reworking his Apprentice into a...
