Just when my thoughts were etching a loop as I struggled to describe Madeleine Thien’s new novel, The Book of Records, I came across this Joy Williams quotation*: “What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.” That is, indeed,
The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction lodged in my mind because I really loved its inaugural winner: Kadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust when I first read it. Bill and I read it again earlier this year, while anticipating the announcement of this year’s shortlisted books.
Louise Erdrich and Barbara Kingsolver, Amy Tan and Elizabeth Strout: these are some of the writers whose stories about parenting, and being parented, stand out in my mind. Claudia Dey’s fiction could be included here, too, although her stories spiral around alienation and abandonment—the ways in which those who
Indigenous activist and leader, Ailton Krenak (Aimoré/Krenak), has published three of his short essays in Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (Translated from the Portuguese by Anthony Doyle in 2020). With clarity and passion, he illustrates how the indigenous perspective acknowledges and nurtures relationships with parts
Stories set in—and revolving around—Vietnam have appeared on BIP many times, like Marcelino Truong’s coming-of-age memoir in translation by David Homel: Such a Lovely Little War (2014; 2015) (his follow-up, Saigon Calling, brought the family to England). Also Robert Olen Butler’s Perfume River (2016) but to say much more
