New York. HarperCollins. 2020. 328 pages.
“IMAGINE THIS: the author Fang Fang did not exist in today’s Wuhan. . . . What would we have heard? What would we have seen?” asked writer Ya…
MISCELLANEOUS
Abingdon, UK. Routledge. 2019. 293 pages. BEYOND EAST AND WEST: A Story of Civilization through the Great Epics, by Suchethana Swaroop, is an attempt to shed light o…
London. Faber & Faber. 2019. 239 pages. “WHAT IS NORMAL tea?” Henrietta Lovell, the founder of the Rare Tea Company, wants you to reflect on this question. Hers is a white silver…
New York. Spuyten Duyvil. 2020. 222 pages. SMART, BITING, VIOLENT, and often perplexing, this memoir is reminiscent of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. Beyond the authors hav…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2020. 304 pages. LÁSZLO F. FÖLDÉNYI is a widely lauded Hungarian essayist, cultural critic, and professor at the University of Theatre,…
New York. Other Press. 2020. 275 pages. DRESSED FOR A DANCE IN THE SNOW represents a work of oral history based on interviews the author conducted with nine female survivors…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2020. 368 pages. THIS GRAPHIC NARRATIVE begins in the uncertain days after the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Author and artist Tian Ve…
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson
New York. Crown. 2020. 585 pages. AFTER READING this study and skimming the end sections, I stand in awe: what one man can research, consolidate, and narrate in prose that reads like…
New York. Grove Press. 2020. 209 pages. YAN LIANKE'S Three Brothers: Memories of My Family is a powerful portrait of the trials of daily life in Song County, Henan Province,…
London. Honford Star. 2020. 182 pages. WHAT IS LOCAL IDENTITY? What have we lost in the name of development? How do we best pass on traditional culture to the next ge…
London. Flipped Eye. 2019. 188 pages. THE IDIOSYNCRASY OF my own origin story made me particularly fascinated by Un Nuevo Sol, a collection of works by British Latinx writers…
New York. Doubleday. 2019. 431 pages. Gods of the Upper Air tells the story of Franz Boas, an outspoken critic of white supremacists, and his profound influence on three students—Margaret Me…
London. Verso. 2019. 330 pages. Add Vigdis Hjorth to the growing list of writers of significant autofiction, reality literature whose characters depend on recognizable people and actual situations. L…
Portland. Tin House Books. 2020. 203 pages. “Dear Eun Ji. Hello, hello, hello, my Eun Ji.” E. J. Koh’s memoir begins with a letter from her mother, its diction informal and lighthearted, its details…
New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 2020. 269 pages. Considered one of Spain’s most acclaimed novelists, Javier Cercas knows how easily men lie to themselves in order to give themselves sufficient leeway to do…
New York. New Directions. 2020. 80 pages. It is no coincidence that this narrative exercise is published after César Aira’s participation at MoMA’s 2017 editorial project The Valise, a collec…
New York. Graywolf Press. 2019. 247 pages. “Writing is a way to get rid of shame,” says Karl Ove Knausgaard, reflecting on why he wrote his celebrated 3,600-plus-page-long multivolume memoir, My S…
New York. Other Press. 2020. 421 pages. A lifetime—seventy-five years—has passed since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, and other hellholes emblematic of the European extermination…
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I Incidental Inventions. New York. Europa Editions. 2019. 117 pages. Elena Ferrante’s Key Words. New York. Europa Editions. 2019. 308 pages. IN OCTOBER 2016…
New York. Little, Brown Spark. 2019. 520 pages. In a time when we stand more divided than we have in decades and global leaders treat international relations as zero-sum games, it is necessary to be r…
Seattle. University of Washington Press. 2019. 266 pages. The best aspect of Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers is its intrinsic anthological quality. This…
Belmont, North Carolina. Wiseblood Books. 2019. 213 pages. Dana Gioia is unique in contemporary poetry, as his poetry and critical commentary confirm. Rather than rise through the ranks of “academic b…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2019. 480 pages. An oral history in comics form, Grass tells the story of Korean national Lee Ok-Sun, who, at the age of fifteen, was abducted into sexual sla…
New York. New York Review Books. 2019. 135 pages. Beginning with the burial of a father’s lung, Marion Fayolle crafts a remarkable allegorical journey of family, illness, and loss in this idiosyncrat…
New York. Dey Street Books. 2019. 382 pages. Isha Sesay’s Beneath the Tamarind Tree is a grave-toned paean to the fortitude of the roughly 276 Nigerian schoolgirls from Chibok who were abduct…