Last Week In Books: Support Black Writers, Asian Bookstores and Palestinian Libraries

Fellow readers! Welcome to this week’s round up of diverse bookish news across genres. Info about diverse writers is becoming even more thin on the ground, which has increased my resolve to keep up with these posts as often as I can.

Then again, it is the Blah time before winter solstice and for some reason I still don’t fully understand, I have chosen to live in New England. These 4 pm sunsets are doing me IN, y’all, but I’m still going to try and be coherent and undepressed while I share these tidbits with you. Without further ado…

  • I remember when Yu and Me bookstore made headlines for being New York City’s first Asian-American woman-owned bookstore. Sadly, it recently burnt down and owner Lucy Yu is working hard to regroup and rebuild. Worth taking a look and maybe ordering a book from their Bookshop to help their efforts out. [The Guardian]
  • From Asian-American bookshop owners to writers…Qui Nguyen co-wrote the Disney film Raya and the Last Dragon, and also writes plays about Vietnamese Americans in the American South. The latest, Poor Yella Rednecks, is about a married Vietnamese-American couple in Arkansas and somehow includes martial arts and hip hop. Fascinating, right? (Side note; there are a surprising number of people in the arts named Qui Nguyen.) [New York Times]
  • Read Palestine Week is in full swing, so if you haven’t already please check out their page and download some work by Palestinian writers to enrich your bookshelves with. If you, like me, are more of a genre fiction reader, speculative writer Sonia Sulaiman has put together a reading list of Palestinian speculative fiction that is well worth checking out. [Sonia Sulaiman]
  • In sobering counterpoint, the main public library in Gaza has been destroyed. [Yahoo]
  • A video from Black Gay Comic Geek alerted me to the Showtime series Fellow Travelers, based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Fallon. I’m rarely surprised, but watching a series about gay men who work in the government during the McCarthy era that includes graphic, non-gratuitous, story-building gay sex scenes got my attention in a good way and sent me down a history rabbit hole. I’d heard plenty about both McCarthy and former Trump lawyer Roy Cohn, but virtually nothing about the Lavender Scare that forms the background of this show. [Showtime]
  • The book that inspired Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magnum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude, Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, has just had a new English translation that everyone is waxing poetic about. [New York Times]
  • Motherhood is something that many of us have a complicated relationship with, and this new novel A Grandmother Begins The Story by Metis writer Michelle Porter, is a series of intertwined stories about mothers. It looks like it untangles some of the knots tied around the subject. [NPR]
  • It was alarmingly hard to find anything about new books by Black writers to post this week, so I’ll round this week’s update out with a call for support for an emerging Black writer instead. Donyae Coles, a Black author and artist, is raising funds to go to Under The Volcano in January 2024. I went to UTV in 2022 and it was a formative experience. Donyae is much farther along in her career than I was at the time I went and she deserves this experience. Help her out if you have a little change. [GoFundMe]

As always, fellow readers, thanks for reading. Remember that any purchases you make from links to the Equal Opportunity Bookshop earn us a commission, and go read something good! Peace!

[REVIEW] Wild Spaces, by S. L. Coney

(Buy this book here.)

This debut horror novella was a very nice surprise.

In the double magics of pre-internet childhood and coastal South Carolina, an eleven-year old boy, his biologist father and his pretty, secretive mother have their peaceful beachfront cottage life disturbed when the boy’s grandfather shows up one day. Nothing’s quite right about the old man, not even his ankles. That not-rightness slowly chips away at the household’s peace, and it seems that the only thing standing between the boy and his grandfather’s slowly unfurling monstrosity is a very faithful dog named Teach. How long Teach can protect the boy from his own growing curiosity and strengthening will is a different story, however.

At their best, horror stories are metaphors for the things we have a hard time understanding about ourselves and our relationships. This works better in some stories than others, and it’s done perfectly in this book. There’s both joy and terror in becoming an adult. The rapid physical changes of puberty, the sudden self-aware emotional inclusion in family traumas, and the realization that the simple loving safety of a good childhood can’t always protect grown-up you are all folded perfectly into these pages, and then some. I won’t spoil the how, but at the end of this, I was sad and scared and creeped out and wanted to give both the boy and myself a hug.

The writing is really good, too. It’s the kind of well-turned, thoughtful prose that makes you look up words and not mind it. It’s the kind of writing where almost no one has a name but it’s still easy to keep track of all the characters. Coney immerses you emotionally and sensorily in the boy’s world so well that you can taste the salt and feel the sorrow equally.

One thing – I don’t usually read reviews, but I did for this and was surprised and annoyed by what people are flagging this book for. It’s a big spoiler, so warning — there’s a spoiler in the rest of this paragraph. A lot of people–mostly women of a certain demographic–are one-starring this book on Goodreads and Amazon. Why? Because the dog dies. A lot of people don’t like animal deaths in fiction, but this isn’t a gratuitous death–it’s the last beat of sadness in a very sad and wild ending. Also, there is child abuse and a very gruesome femicide in this book and nobody’s one-starring it for either of those. I feel like the folks one-starring this for animal death really aren’t on their own side, if you know what I mean.

This was good in a way I haven’t experienced in a while–moving, relatable, and equal parts otherworldly and sadly familiar.

A treat for a very good dog and a hug for a growing “boy” to Wild Spaces.

(Fellow readers! This was very good, if not exactly seasonal. Check it and others like it out at the Equal Opportunity Bookshop, but remember we earn a commission for every purchase made from a link on this site. Thanks for reading, and peace!)

Last Week In Books: Yes, That’s My Real Voice

Fellow readers! Didya miss me? Whether or not you did, here I am again with one of my intermittent news updates covering the world of diverse books and diverse readers. Let’s jump right in!

  • Last summer I attended the Prague Summer Writer’s Program and while there, met an opera singer with a podcast on what it’s like to be an artist in the current climate. She graciously had me on as a guest, discussing AI, returning to America, and how I became a writer. I get a bit nervous about speaking on the record, but this came out pretty well, and I appreciate the thoughtfulness of this interview. [Artists on the Verge]
  • Presented (largely) without comment: Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha was captured, detained, and beaten by Israeli forces when evacuating Gaza. [TIME]
  • I’m not going to make this blog a focal point for things I don’t have expansive knowledge of, but I will say that reading diversely and extensively is how I understand that one can condemn genocide and anti-Semitism without contradiction. Some of the books that helped me develop that understanding came from Haymarket Books, who are giving away free books about Palestine that are worth reading and marking the rest of their catalog down by 40% until January. If you’re looking to enrich your knowledge of social justice, history, or global issues, check them out. [Haymarket Books]
  • November is Native American Heritage Month and while I decided a while ago I find it too exhausting to read and blog in themes, other people are still doing the good work. Novelist Oscar Hokeah made a list of other indigenous writers and their works to check out this month that is a great place to start. [Pen America]
  • Theatre professionals in Kathmandu are making a point of reading diverse literature to boost their creative capital, and the resulting booklist is an interesting snapshot of what Nepalis are reading. [Kathmandu Post]
  • I really want to read The Heaven And Earth Grocery Store but my literary cup runneth over and I’m not sure when I’ll have time. Anything that revisits historical solidarity between marginalized communities — in this case, Black and Jewish people –is my cup of tea. [The Guardian]
  • Last link for now; Rwanda has been on my curiosity radar for a moment, and Scholastique Mukasonga’s new novel Kibogo, all about the country’s Christianization, definitely has my attention. [The Guardian]

See you next time I have a spare moment to do a round-up, beautiful people. If you want to buy some diverse books and support this site, be sure to check out the Equal Opportunity Bookshop. We get a small commission for every book bought, and Amazon gets none. Now, go read something good. Peace!

(The photo at the top of this post was taken by Happy Black Chick Photography, who you should also check out.)

[REVIEW]The Rose That Grew From Concrete, by Tupac Shakur

(Buy this book here.)

So, the poems in this book are absolutely terrible and we need to talk about that.

Put away your pitchforks and torches. I said what I said. This book of posthumously published poetry by one of hip-hop’s most lauded voices is…pretty bad. The rhymes are trite, the metaphors banal (when they’re there at all) and if I didn’t already know an embarrassing amount about ‘Pac’s life story, I’d wonder who on earth Jada was and why there’s a string of poems dedicated to her.

Despite the generous foreword by Nikki Giovanni herself and the gangsta reputation Shakur had on the mic, these poems read like the musings of a slightly silly, hopelessly romantic teenage boy.

That’s because they are.

That’s what makes this interesting.

The poems in this book were written between 1989 and 1991.

Do me a favor. Watch this video.

Tupac is 17 years old here. He started writing these poems a year later. This Tupac is not the same Tupac who had beef with Biggie and got shot 5 times. This is not the Pac who went to prison. He’s not even the Pac who went on a movie road trip with Janet Jackson and Regina King in a postal van.

This is late teens art school Tupac, softer and sweeter, figuring himself and his emotions out, navigating love and beauty, but slowly, beginning to realize that the politics of class and race would always make his tender, precious self a target of national perception rather than personal humanity. These poems were his private musings, never meant for publication. This is really just Tupac working things out on the page like any other artsy kid.

There’s something precious and painful and thought-provoking in that, which is why this book, while not great poetry, is actually okay.

I wouldn’t recommend this to someone who wants to read serious poetry–he literally rhymes moon with June at one point–but as a reliquary holding a young man’s heart before life required it to be hidden deep within a persona, this book makes sense.

Writing workshops and a wonder of what could’ve been to The Rose That Grew From Concrete.

(Fellow readers, happy day after eating holiday to you, if you celebrate. This review was inspired in part by a video from the YouTuber F.D. Signifier. The video in question seems to have been taken down, but I still highly recommend checking out F.D.’s channel. This review was also made possible because I received a beautiful hardback copy of this book in a Goodreads giveaway. If you’re interested in diverse poetry that is not terrible and doesn’t require fandom to enjoy, check out this poetry booklist at the Equal Opportunity Bookshop. Reminder: we have an affiliate relationship with Bookshop and if you purchase a book there, we get paid. It’s only like a dollar or two per book, but every little helps. Now, go read something good and enjoy the rest of your holiday weekend, if you have one. Peace!)

[REVIEW] I Am AI, by Ai Jiang

(Buy this book.)

It’s taken me a while to write a proper review of this novelette because I really felt it in a deep and personal place that I’m not really sure how to talk about it. Sorry in advance if this gets treacly, or treaclier than usual, anyway.

The city of Emit exists somewhere in the future, full of technologically advanced marvels and flashy wealth. But that’s not where this story takes place. Ai(who has the same name as the book’s author but is not the same person, I don’t think) lives just outside of the city with all of the other poor people who sell their artistic labor cheaply to keep Emit’s marketing mechanisms spinning. Ai’s parents were victims of corporate skullduggery and her neighbors are barely holding on. She’s resorted to selling bits of herself off, slowly becoming more machine than woman in order to keep up with the punishing demands of her freelance work, in which she pretends to be an artificial intelligence language model, churning out thousands of meaningless corporate words just to keep her battery barely charged.

Overwork kills slowly, but first it wraps you in loneliness to keep you from noticing. I was a content writer for a while. It seemed like freedom until I realized I was regularly putting in 60-hour weeks, still barely scraping by, and slowly running my limited batteries down.

And for what, really? I’m still not sure. All I know is that this book fit into the burnt-out space in my mind hollowed out by hustling, then made me really think about how to do better. The working-class community that uplift and annoy Ai made me smile and miss the days when I had a similar community. This book made me grateful that I made some strong choices this summer to reclaim my humanity from the American hamster wheel. And it did something else that not enough sci-fi is currently doing–it leaves us on a note of hope and healing. Sure, things can suck–in both the present and in the dystopic future Jiang has built to metaphorize it–but they can get better. It takes human connection and strong choices–but they can.

And people say that sci-fi is too far out to connect to real life and emotion. Pffft.

A full power charge and more art to I Am AI.

Thank you to Ai Jiang for sending over a review copy of this book. Apologies that it took me so long to post this, and congratulations on your awesome writing year!

(Fellow readers, beautiful people, countrymen in the land of bookworm bliss! Thanks for reading, as always. If you want to read more sci-fi from diverse writers, take a nosy around the Equal Opportunity Bookshop. We have an affiliate relationship with that site and earn a commission from each book you buy there, which we use to buy more books, of course. Now, go and read something good! Peace!)

[REVIEW] Chlorine, by Jade Song

(To buy this book, click here.)

Ren Yu– daughter of Chinese immigrants, indifferent high school student, favorite pupil of her lecherous coach, unrequited love of teammate Cathy’s budding lesbian life — knows deep down that she’s really always been a mermaid. The Pennsylvania suburbs are a bit far from the beach, but Ren feeds her true self on swimming pool chlorine and strengthens it by spending her entire childhood and adolescence obsessively becoming the type of elite swimmer college scouts drool over.

Blurbs and summaries of this book had me expecting a fairy tale. I went in expecting magical realism, mythology, and cultural redemption. I was not expecting to throw the book down after the last line and shout “GIRL ARE YOU A MERMAID OR JUST DEAD?!?“

That’s not a spoiler, by the way. The first page of the book sets you up to wonder and the story never really answers you, because it turns out this isn’t a fairy tale after all. It’s a manifesto, a pissed-off mermaid-as-metaphor for confused queer femme Chinese American coming-of-age that whaps you over the head with pure rage in the first chapter and never really lets up, even in its many sad moments.

There’s a lot of craft on display here. Song has a strong voice that rings with the sort of complex imagery that speaks to deep intercultural understanding and hours spent redefining literature for oneself. This is the kind of book that will probably eventually be taught in English classes and dissected endlessly, word by word.

There’s a sense of importance in this book and its themes. There’s also a sense of exhaustion and overwhelm. It wasn’t written to or for me, I don’t think, so I hesitate to criticize it just because it’s about a heaviness I’ve never been asked to carry. I do feel like I should tell you all that this wasn’t a fun read. It was challenging and intense and very, very, proclamative, but if you’re expecting mermaids and positive self-discovery, that’s not what this is. If you’re a queer Asian woman who needs your own rage and self-determination acknowledged and affirmed, this may be your book. If you think the original ending of Andersen’s Little Mermaid is the only one that makes sense, you might dig this, too.

A clean tampon, a new swimsuit, and a healthy appreciation for the human body to Chlorine.

(Fellow readers! I’ve had a lot of health and work things going on lately, but my end-of-year promise to myself is to blog more and better. In the meantime, thanks as always for reading. If you want to read more stories of Asian-Americans, please check out my booklist (East) Asian People, (East) Asian Cultures, (East) Asian Diasporas at the Equal Opportunity Bookshop. Reminder that we have an affiliate relationship with that site and any purchases you make will result in a commission being paid into the Equal Opportunity Book Fund. Now, go read something good! Peace!)

[REVIEW] The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty

(Buy this book here.)

This book is absolutely delightful and this review will do it no justice. You have been warned.

Amina Al-Sirafi is a middle-aged single mother with bad knees who lives in a modest country house and minds her own business.

She was also one of the most fearsome pirates who ever sailed the Indian Ocean, at least until strange magic claimed a beloved crewmember and drove her to retirement on dry land. When a mysterious connection to her past comes calling with a simple but lucrative job, she rounds up her respectably retired former crew and takes to the high seas again, only to find that the stakes are far higher and the reward much more important than anyone expected.

I don’t think I can fit everything I love about this book in this post. It’s funny, it’s magical, it’s heart-in-your-throat thrilling. The adventure is big, the characters lovable, and the villains truly nefarious. There’s magic, romance, monsters, and a villain with a long European name our heroine can’t be bothered learning how to pronounce. It’s everything I want in a historical fantasy adventure and didn’t know already existed.

The book is set in post-Crusades, High Middle Ages Yemen, Oman and Somalia, which is unusual but really shouldn’t be. The time period, its people, and its culture are extraordinarily well-depicted, and I hope that all of the little sequel teasers pan out and we get more of it. These pirates live in a cosmopolitan, multicultural, religiously mixed world, and their story is steeped in mythology and history from the region. It is profoundly satisfying to read this and remember that epic imagination is not culturally limited. Everything is written with an eye for historical detail and the flighty fantastical and it all works together wonderfully.

These are rogues poorly working out redemption through adventure, which means they will cuss, cheat and steal, but finish in time for prayer. They’re raising their kids using the money made from grand larceny on the open seas. They’re also diverse in what I’ve come to think of as a normal way. Amina is a Muslim of what she calls “mixed coastal ancestry”, and her crew includes African Muslims, Arab Christians and at least one Southeast Asian Hindu. The religious pluralism of the world works into the story seamlessly. The book also delves much deeper into sexuality and gender than I think people who are not familiar with Islamic reality would expect. Queer themes, gender difference, and sexuality are mentioned but never equated unnecessarily with sin. Sin, however, is mentioned quite a bit because um, hello? PIRATES. This is a book about pirates and while they’re all quite lovable, they also do dastardly things for treasure, and charm us readers into cheering them on while they do it.

One of the reasons I loved this so much is the fun of discovering the world and the story cold, so I won’t say anymore, although I’m gagging to. There is some interesting author info, though, which I’ll discuss in 5, 4, 3, 2…

This book is so culturally detailed and so deeply authentic in its treatment of Islam, the diversity of Muslim cultures and religious pluralism and secularism in both the present day and the long-ago past. It’s just so wonderfully global that I was very surprised to find out that the author, despite her surname, is an American white woman from New Jersey. She converted to Islam in her teens, married into a family of seeming Southeast Asian descent(going by the name) and apparently studies the region, religion and history. She does it very well. I never had that moment we have all often had where you pause and squint and wonder if someone outside of a culture wrote something just to be cool. I admit to being puzzled and a bit put off when I first Googled her, but this book is so good that I got over it in about 5 pages. Your opinion may differ, but ultimately, this book is a work of cultural appreciation, not appropriation. If you’ve been on this blog awhile you know I have no problem flaming silly white authors when it’s deserved, but that is not at all the case here. This book is good, on its own merits. Go read it.

Good maps, heaps of treasure, and restful shore leave to The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi

[REVIEW]Remedies for Disappearing, by Alexa Patrick

(Buy this wonderful book here.)

FINALLY AND AT LAST!

It’s been (rightly) noted that I can be rather hard on Black woman writers. (Apologies to Tiffany D Jackson, Tracey Deonn, Jasmine Mans, and others…) I think it’s because I’m aching for us to truly center ourselves and our experiences as our frame of reference, rather than endlessly spiral into the madness of responding to external prejudices.

This poetry collection satisfies that ache. I feel so seen in these verses, in all my Blackness, in all my womanhood, in all my feminity. I think others will, too. Alexa Patrick does the wonderful thing that all good poets do and magnifies small moments into vast meditations on being, connecting, and feeling. Sharing headphones with a stranger on a bus, being one of the two little Black girls in a ballet class, walking past groups of Black men outside of a grocery store, first kisses, last meetings, auntie gatherings, mother ghosts, proms, seasons, love, sadness – it’s all here. It’s all seen and known and examined and loved and it all makes me feel like this is really the Black girl poetry book I’ve needed for a while.

Particularly notable is a series of poems based on prom stories shared by Black girls from a small Connecticut town. They were gathered on Zoom during 2020, and provide an antidote to the painful erasure many Black girls experience when coming of age in a country that seeks to negatively quantify and deny our womanhood at an early age. These were challenging, but beautifully made. I’ve never seen these feelings and experiences presented so transparently or tenderly, and I’m sure I’ll visit those words again.

Here’s how much I loved this book: I NEVER tag authors in reviews but I feel the need to publicly say: @alexalaurel , you DID this, ma’am! Thank you for the words and the empathy.

A hug for the prom girls, a side-eye for the grocery store brothas, and a smile for the lady in the mirror to Remedies For Disappearing.

[REVIEW] The Cutting Season, by Attica Locke

(Buy this book at the Equal Opportunity Bookshop)

I know I keep saying that thrillers and mysteries are really #notmygenre, but books like this and Razorblade Tears are really trying to change my mind. (Notice that both of these books are blackity-Black. Representation matters!)

Caren Gray is the general manager of the historic Louisiana plantation Belle Vie. She’s also a direct descendant of the enslaved Africans who built its wealth. Now the heirs to that ill-gotten fortune are Caren’s bosses, and she and her young daughter are creating a home steeped in an uncomfortable history on the grounds, a stone’s throw away from the old slave cabins.

That is, until a young Guatemalan cane worker is found dead on the property. What seems to be a senseless tragedy is actually linked to the history of the plantation and the people who lay claim to it, past and present. Economic injustice and human exploitation from the past interweave with the ambitions of the present, and one death points to another, with jarring ramifications across generations.

This book was published in 2012, but it’s still startlingly relevant now. Without giving too many spoilers, much of the plot hinges on revisionist history and narrative control for political reasons, and boy, doesn’t that sound familiar? When this book was written, the USA was still immersed in the hope and idealism of the Obama years but there’s a simmering hurt in this book embodied through Caren that almost feels a bit prescient now.

I’m not giving a lot of details because one of the pleasures of the thriller genre is unwrapping all of the details as you read, and I don’t want to deprive anyone of that. I can say, however, that this book is very well-written. The prose is atmospheric and builds up a slow, uneasy suspense without sacrificing beautiful imagery or wordplay like a lot of thrillers do. (At least, according to my stereotypes of the genre, which admittedly may be a bit unfair.)

This was a rare summer read for me–enjoyable, easy, but also very thought-provoking and immersive.

Accurate records and true justice to The Cutting Season.

(Fellow readers, this book is one of the reasons you should be reading the backlist, which is something I should really write a whole post about. I’m glad I discovered it. If you’re looking for this book or more like it, consider perusing the Equal Opportunity Bookshop, which has two great features; a)it’s not Amazon and b)if you purchase anything from this site’s Bookshop link, we get a little affiliate kickback. Whatever you do, go read something good! Peace!)