Daily Archives: February 7, 2020

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich: Celebrated novelist Erdrich, author of Love Medicine, The Plague of Doves, and The Round House, returns to the Chippewa Turtle Mountain Reservation in The Night Watchman. One of the most powerful voices in contemporary Native-American literature, Erdrich provides a fictionalization of her own uncle’s story, when he journeyed from North Dakota to Washington DC inContinue reading “https://themillions.com/2020/01/draft-most-anticipated-the-great-first-half-2020-book-preview.html”

Amnesty by Aravind Adiga: The Booker Prize-winning author’s new novel depicts the plight of an illegal immigrant and refugee in Australia. The protagonist, Danny (short for Dhananjaya), flees his native Sri Lanka for Sydney, where he takes up residence in a grocery stockroom and works as a cleaner to support himself. He gets by and saves upContinue reading “https://themillions.com/2020/01/draft-most-anticipated-the-great-first-half-2020-book-preview.html”

And I Do Not Forgive You by Amber Sparks: A rangy yarn-spinner, Sparks is capable of real surprise and real sentiment. There are ghosts here, and women who have been buried in history. In “Our Mutual (Theater) Friend,” a woman “explodes every now and then in the most embarrassing fashion, usually at children’s birthday parties,” waxing “aboutContinue reading “https://themillions.com/2020/01/draft-most-anticipated-the-great-first-half-2020-book-preview.html”

Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong: As an acclaimed poet, Hong is constantly creating new language and interrogating existing narratives, particularly in Dance, Dance Revolution (Norton 2017), and here strikes out on a different vector with this memoir/essay collection that’s hard to define with its intimate looks at micro-moments, sweeping narrative arcs, and deep-dives into philosophy and cultural criticism.Continue reading “https://themillions.com/2020/01/draft-most-anticipated-the-great-first-half-2020-book-preview.html”

“Meng Jin is a writer whose sweep is as intimate as it is global. Little Gods is a novel about the heart-wracking ways in which we move through history and time. A fierce and intelligent debut from a writer with longitude and latitude embedded in her vision.” — Colum McCann

If China has a Kafka, it may be Mo Yan. Like Kafka, Yan (The Republic of Wine; Red Sorghum) has the ability to examine his society through a variety of lenses, creating fanciful, Metamorphosis-like transformations or evoking the numbing bureaucracy and casual cruelty of modern governments. The title novella of this collection of eight tales chronicles theContinue reading “https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781559705653”

Decadence and debauchery in post-Mao China find a scathing satirist in the author of the lauded Red Sorghum, as he waxes metafictional in this savage, hallucinatory farce. The tale is set in an imaginary Chinese province called Liquorland, where custom dictates the consumption of mind-boggling quantities of sundry fine liquors. Other appetites are indulged, outrageously,Continue reading “https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/authorpage/mo-yan.html”

The author of Red Sorghum and China’s most revered and controversial novelist returns with his first major publication since winning the Nobel Prize. In 2012, the Nobel committee confirmed Mo Yan’s position as one of the greatest and most important writers of our time. In his much-anticipated new novel, Mo Yan chronicles the sweeping history of modernContinue reading “https://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/317277/frog/?ref=PRH28100532E1”

Winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, Yan (Red Sorghum) is one of China’s most visible and controversial writers. In his latest novel, he depicts the implementation of China’s national family planning policy and its effect on the inhabitants of a rural village. Through the letters of Wan Zu, aka “Tadpole,” Yan charts theContinue reading “https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780525427988”

In an Author’s Note, the Nobel Prize winner observes that he “had trouble” answering friends who asked what this historical novel was about, before concluding that it was “all about sound.” Mo attempts to preempt the criticism he anticipates by stating that the book “will likely not be a favorite of readers of Western literature,Continue reading “https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780806143392”