RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleMasterful ... Riveting in its unexpected turns, Real Americans is a novel about past mistakes and their echoes — and a reminder that those histories need not be binding.
Aube Rey Lescure
RaveThe Boston Globe\"Rey Lescure avoids the trap of predictability as she connects the dots between Lu Fang’s past as a lowly worker and his present as a rich Shanghai landlord married to an American woman. Her writing reflects a gift for vivid setting and distinctive characters, both of which bring to life the heady, wildly optimistic era of mid-2000s China ... Rey Lescure proves herself to be a remarkably humane storyteller, focusing on the ties between her characters and the worlds they inhabit in order to ground an ambitious, multi-generational story of global upheaval in personal, poignant detail.\
C Pam Zhang
RaveThe San Francisco ChronicleScintillating ... Page after page of decadent, sensual writing ... By sprinkling her fiction with smart, speculative touches, she reveals that we as humans can still imagine better, more brilliant outcomes when looking toward the past, present and future. And for Zhang and her readers, taking this route can be fiendishly, deliciously fun.
Alexandra Chang
RaveSan Francisco ChronicleCompelling and compulsively readable, Tomb Sweeping reveals that Chang is a writer who’s only just beginning to show readers her impressive range. Subtle wisdom runs rampant through these pages, often cloaked in humor or character quirks or dialogue.
Sang Young Park tr. Anton Hur
RaveEaterSouth Korean readers have devoured Park’s work, a necessary, exciting addition to Korean literature, making him a national bestseller in his home country. There’s a generosity and biting humor that imbues his stories, with glittering descriptions that render our food-and-drink-obsessed culture in liquid-crystal high definition ... Despite the heavy subject matter – in addition to abortion, Park writes about HIV, a parent’s declining health, and a series of devastating heartbreaks – the book is buoyed by wit served at the hard-and-fast pace of the K-pop dance hits that Young loves so dearly. Hur, the book’s translator, manages to preserve that rhythm in English through a flawless, breezy millennial vernacular that veers artfully between slang like \'dickmatized\' and poetic ruminations on \'the taste of the universe\' within the span of a single chapter. The delicious, unbridled joy in Park’s depiction of queer Korean life is revolutionary and fun as hell to read ... But Love in the Big City’s real effect was how it intensified my yearning to return to Seoul. At a time when international travel is ill-advised or all-out barred (South Korea still requires U.S. travelers to quarantine to prevent the spread of covid-19, with some exceptions, and neighboring Japan just closed its borders to foreign visitors), I wish I could sit over a table of burbling stews with treasured old friends whom I haven’t seen since the pandemic began, revisiting all the desires and ambitions that we once craved. For now, settling into the pages of Love in the Big City feels as close as I can get.
