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Recent Reviews
Ocean Vuong
Rave TIME The poems from his book Night Sky With Exit Wounds expose raw hurt, love and joy, and in performing them, he demonstrated the confidence required to reveal himself. Vuong does the same in his compelling, emotional first novel ... Vuong as a writer is daring. He goes where the hurt is, creating a novel saturated with yearning and ache. Little Dog is turned inside out by his search for validation, and Vuong imbues his quest with meaning that extends beyond the personal ... Vuong refuses to be embarrassed. He transforms the emotional, the visceral, the individual into the political in an unforgettable–indeed, gorgeous–novel, a book that seeks to affect its readers as profoundly as Little Dog is affected, not only by his lover but also by the person who brought him into the world[.]
Wesley Yang
Pan The New York Times Book Review \"My disappointment with Wesley Yang’s collection of essays, The Souls of Yellow Folk, stems from the difference between what it is and what it could have been: a necessary, uncomfortable, possibly even great book ... Whether the book’s title is false advertising or self-sabotage, the result is frustrating to read ... This Asian-American legacy in politics and art is invisible to Yang, who does not even mention Frank Chin, the writer who most forcefully dealt with the agonies of Asian-American manhood ... [Yang] fails either to consider what sort of defiant political struggle would force recognition or what an individual solution might look like. Yang thus leaves the reader stranded with him in his ambivalence about what it means, if anything, to be \'yellow.\' His book, which calls out and to yellow folks but is only partially concerned with us, is as lukewarm as the racial grievance he senses and feels.\
Luis Alberto Urrea
Positive The New York Times Book Review Be alert, be attentive, be appreciative. And there is much to appreciate in Urrea’s highly entertaining story of Big Angel, the de La Cruz family’s patriarch ... The quips and jokes come fast through a poignant novel that is very much about time itself, especially the passing of time and the inevitability of death ... Anger and sorrow are one pair of emotions that keeps surfacing throughout The House of Broken Angels. So do love and pain, joy and resentment, hatred and reconciliation, backstabbing and tenderness. All complicated, all compelling in Urrea’s powerful rendering of a Mexican-American family that is also an American family.
Mohsin Hamid
Rave The New York Times Book Review Hamid’s enticing strategy is to foreground the humanity of these young people, whose urbanity, romantic inclinations, upwardly mobile aspirations and connectedness through social media and smartphones mark them as 'normal' relative to the novel’s likely readers. At the same time, he insists on their 'difference' from readers who may be Western. Their city is besieged by militants who commit terrible atrocities, evoking scenes from Mosul or Aleppo ... Hamid takes full advantage of our familiarity with these scenes to turn Exit West into an urgent account of war, love and refugees ... The novel implicitly asks these readers why doors should be closed to refugees, when those readers might become refugees one day? How these doors work is not Hamid’s concern. The doors can be manifestations of magic realism, fantasy or science fiction, or all three, but they simply stand in for the reality that refugees will try every door they can to get out ... This gentle optimism, this refusal to descend into dystopia, is what is most surprising about Hamid’s imaginative, inventive novel. A graceful writer who does not shy away from contentious politics and urgent, worldly matters — and we need so many more of these writers — Hamid exploits fiction’s capacity to elicit empathy and identification to imagine a better world.
Christopher Sorrentino
Rave The New York Times Book Review Like one of Nanabozho’s simple, spare tales, Sorrentino’s novel might be a little deceptive because it disguises its complexity. Those tricked by Nanabozho or Sorrentino are guilty of not listening closely enough. The trickster is a cunning storyteller, as is Sorrentino. Not that he’s just some smart guy who writes excellent sentences. He also delivers what any reader of a thriller would expect. Rest assured that by the end of the book guns are drawn, shots are fired and we finally hear the voice of the dead.
Erika Lee
Rave The Los Angeles Times The Making of Asian America takes these simple — and dare I say racist — notions of who Asian Americans are and contrasts them with their rich, complicated stories and their struggles to become a part of the United States and other American countries.