Reviewed by Dave Oei Molly X. Chang’s To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods is an Asian fantasy debut novel about Yang Ruying (Ruy), a young woman who lives in a land conquered and occupied near the time of her birth. Ruy’s once well-regarded family has fallen into despair and hunger through atrocity and war crime, and her mission now is to safeguard what little remains— the lives of her sister and grandmother. The story is inspired by Chang’s grandfather’s experience living in Manchuria, China during World War II, surviving the horror that was Unit 731, the Japanese military’s subjugation of and…

Reviewed by Toby LaPlant Garrard Conley, author of the bestselling memoir Boy Erased, makes his fiction debut with All the World Beside, a soft-spoken exploration of the interplay between religious belief and personal fulfillment, and how love, in its many varieties, can expand our understanding of who makes up a family. With complex characters that embody contemporary relationships to sexuality and gender while belonging wholly to Conley’s historical setting, the novel is a compelling invitation to leap into faith in a queer past that remains largely hidden. Set in colonial America, in the aftermath of the ferocious exercise of condemnation…

Reviewed by Dave Oei Georgia Summers’s debut novel The City of Stardust blends urban and high fantasy into an adventure that spans the English countryside, the continents, places hidden beneath and around us, and the mystical world of Fidelis, a land filled with equal parts magic and horror. It’s a story of a young woman, Violet Everly, who has inherited a family curse and is hell-bent on averting it. Failure means her death. Violet’s adversaries include, among others, a mysterious woman named Penelope who wields insurmountable power; Penelope’s reluctant, heat-starved assistant Yuri; and one particularly hungry ancient god chained under…

Reviewed by Francesca Jimenez In Yellowface, R.F. Kuang delivers a bingeable, page-turner about cultural appropriation and racial identity. The novel also explores self-victimizing, delusional, and conspiratorial effects of social media, fueled by exploitative, capitalistic values that permeate publishing and are embedded in every crevice of society. Athena Liu and June Hayward followed identical writing paths throughout college, meeting at Yale and taking the same classes. But their career similarities end there. The novel begins at the height of Athena’s career, having achieved the dream: three best-selling books from a major publisher, stellar reviews, multiple awards, and praise across all media…

Reviewed by Maxamina Muro The Way to Be, Barbara T. Smith’s memoir, is a ride through the life of a woman born in the 1930s, married in the 1950s, who then emerges as a performance artist in the 1960s, when feminism and equal rights for women became more prominent political and legal movements. While these causes were rooted in practical matters like pay equity, parental rights, and career and academic agency, Smith’s work explored the areas of a woman’s life not covered by laws before, during, and after this time of monumental change. Though Smith doesn’t explicitly say so, it’s…

Reviewed by Betty-Jo Tilley A car crash opens Deepti Kapoor’s novel, Age of Vice, the first of three sweeping sagas about organized crime in contemporary India. This prologue provides a metaphor for the story’s roadmap—a fast-paced and riveting collision course of deception, romance and ambition—and introduces the disparity between rich and poor in a world where only the wealthy win and everyone else’s demise is predetermined by their lower caste. When police arrive at the scene of the accident, they find the chauffeur of the totaled Mercedes passed out, an empty bottle at his side. To show limitless brutality, Kapoor…

Reviewed by Melinda Gordon Blum In November 2017, Claire Dederer’s Paris Review essay “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men” documented her personal, lifelong experience of grappling with the problem of separating the art from the artist, exploring whether this is something achievable or even necessary. Monsters is, in part, the book-length outgrowth of that piece. A genre-bridging hybrid of memoir and criticism, the book examines the histories of several artists who (in current terminology) might be classified as problematic. It describes a journey that began when Dederer was a young woman, whose burgeoning identities of writer,…

Reviewed by Jennifer Schuberth While Chloé Cooper Jones’s Easy Beauty is a gripping memoir about parenting, disabilities, and figuring out what to do next, it is also a philosophical masterpiece, written in the tradition of those who see philosophy not as a dry academic subject but as a way of life. In prose that is gorgeous, concise, and often very funny, Cooper Jones explores how she has become a person who can say “I am here” and mean it, while also offering the reader practical advice about how to become such a person. Cooper Jones wants to be “in the…

Reviewed by Jeannine Burgdorf Erica Berry’s first book, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, casts a wide net, examining definitions of nature, the built environment, borders, nations, history and the self within the context of characterizations of wolves. Ambitious in scope and at times dense with references that can seem digressive, the book maintains Berry’s thesis across its more than 400 pages, organized in chapters that reinforce the Girl v. Wolf, Truth v. Wolf, Self v. Wolf. Each fact and fiction she chooses reinforces that humans live with wolves as a construct, within a cultural understanding,…