A night of violence is routine, expected, and devastating in Francisco Maciel’s literary novel There’s No Point in Dying. There is a favela (slum) in the birthplace of samba. At its center are three bars. They’re close enough that... Read More

A man is tasked with finding a missing painting in Naomi Hirahara’s historical novel "Crown City". While adrift in grief, Ryui is offered a job in California by his father’s former client. After a harrowing voyage from Japan, he... Read More

An elder shares her story in Chi Zijian’s reflective novel "The Last Quarter of the Moon". An unnamed Evenki woman laments the loss represented by her home’s emptiness. Her family voted to leave their mountains; modernization... Read More

Devon Jersild’s riveting novel "Luminous Bodies" centers the tumultuous yet fulfilling personal life of legendary scientist Marie Curie. Curie, the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize and the first person to win one twice, exhibited... Read More

Disco Dave is a walrus with the funk in his heart, but he can’t get his feet to boogie to the same rhythm. After one too many dancing disasters, Dave boxes up his bell bottoms and is ready to let his disco dreams die. But when the... Read More

In Susan McCarty’s absorbing, nostalgic novel "2008", the lives of a group of estranged high school friends intertwine again fifteen years later. The story begins in 1993, on the night teenage Stevie, her boyfriend Sam, and her best... Read More

Generations whose stories are informed by the Holocaust converge at a sanitarium by the sea in Morris Collins’s surrealistic, affecting novel "The Tavern at the End of History". Brought together by chance, fate, or inevitability,... Read More

Samantha Ellis’s powerful memoir "Always Carry Salt" exemplifies diaspora yearning and determination. Ellis grew up in the United Kingdom, hearing snippets of the Judeo-Iraqi Arabic of her parents and ancestors. By adulthood, though,... Read More