Reading Craig Davidson's Cataract City took me somewhere else. You might think, if you have heard something of the novel, that I am about to say Niagara Falls. But as much as the novel is about two boys' coming-of-age in this environs, it is a study of how 'what-came-before' morphs and
What a complicated tale. Though perhaps less so than "Open Secrets" and "The Albanian Virgin", for readers have a much broader sense of understanding what "really happened". The possibility of honest understanding, in this case, settles in the last letter that Annie wrote to Sadie. [NOTE: There are some spoilers
Raami is "just a spit past seven" in 1975, when the year of the Tiger shifts to the year of the Rabbit. It is the Khmer New Year, and Raami's parents disagree about whether it is appropriate to celebrate when there is so much misery and fighting. Raami is pleased
Nathacha Appanah's The Last Brother Translator Geoffrey Strachan (French) Graywolf Press, 2011 A Graywolf Press publication, a contender for The Tournament of Books, with a gorgeous and haunting cover image: all excellent reasons for picking up a copy of The Last Brother without reading a single word. And then you meet
1. Remarkable wrangling with world-changing matters: racism. (Most of what I say below is about this: but there are other fine reasons too.) 2. Southern US setting (Many readers know and love Southern fiction, but this isn't Mississippi: it's Arkansas. That's refreshing. Even if Chess does think it's boring!) "I
