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Fiction A to Z January 2021
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| Nights When Nothing Happened by Simon HanWhat it is: the sobering story of a hardworking Chinese family in Texas, whose fragile, happy-enough façade falls apart in the wake of a misunderstanding.
Read it for: themes of belonging and loyalty; fully realized characters suffering through discontent and disillusion; a leisurely paced unfolding of an immigrant experience in the United States.
What to read next: Akhil Sharma's Family Life, about an Indian family whose immigration to the U.S. is similarly challenged by tragedy. |
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Perestroika In Paris
by Jane Smiley
Coexisting in the lush hidden spaces of Paris until cold weather arrives, an escaped racehorse and her companion, a German shorthaired pointer, forge a bond with a boy living in seclusion with his nonagenarian grandmother in an ivy-covered house.
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| Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi; translated by Geoffrey TrousselotIs time travel possible? It is in a tiny Tokyo café, where one particular chair allows its occupants to visit past experiences (though several rules apply).
Is it for you? The physics of time travel is not addressed here; instead, four characters simply get a second chance to revisit lost loved ones.
Book buzz: This English-language debut by Japanese playwright Toshikazu Kawaguchi was a bestseller in Japan. |
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That Time of Year
by Marie NDiaye
After his wife and child disappear at the end of their vacation in a small French village, Herman sets out to find them, only to find that his urgent inquiry immediately recedes into the background and he wittingly and not, becomes one with a society defined by its strange traditions, ghostly apparitions, hospitality that verges on mania, and a nightmarish act of collective forgetting.
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| Eartheater by Dolores Reyes; translated by Julia SanchesWhat it is: a coming-of-age novel set in contemporary Argentina and teeming with magical realism.
What happens? The unnamed narrator, a high school dropout, feels compelled to eat dirt -- and experiences visions of people who are missing or dead when she does so. Thanks to this distressing skill, she is both shunned and sought out in equal measure in a country suffering stark violence, particularly against women.
Book buzz: Eartheater was named a Best Book of Fall 2020 by Time, Vulture.com, The Boston Globe, Cosmopolitan, Wired.com, and more. |
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The Best American Short Stories 2020
by Curtis Sittenfeld
Featuring guest editor contributions by the best-selling author of Rodham and You Think It, I’ll Say It, a latest edition of the respected literary annual collects 20 top-selected short stories from the previous year.
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The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories
by Caroline Kim
Exploring what it means to be human through the Korean diaspora, Caroline Kim's stories feature many voices. From a teenage girl in 1980's America, to a boy growing up in the middle of the Korean War, to an immigrant father struggling to be closer to his adult daughter, each character must face their less-than-ideal circumstances and find a way to overcome them without losing themselves.
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Where the Wild Ladies Are
by Aoko Matsuda
In this witty and exuberant collection of linked stories, Aoko Matsuda takes the rich, millenia-old tradition of Japanese folktales-shapeshifting wives and foxes, magical trees and wells-and wholly reinvents them, presenting a world in which humans are consoled, guided, challenged, and transformed by the only sometimes visible forces that surround them.
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The Awkward Black Man : Stories
by Walter Mosley
A collection of seventeen of Mosley's most accomplished short stories to display the full range of his remarkable talent. Mosley presents distinct characters as they struggle to move through the world in each of these stories-heroes who are awkward, nerdy, self-defeating, self-involved, and, on the whole, odd. He overturns the stereotypes that corral black male characters and paints a subtle, powerful portrait of each of these unique individuals.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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