A man restarts life after serving ten years as a political prisoner in the graphic biography "The Boy from Clearwater", which records society-wide changes in Taiwan over time. Released from Taiwan’s Green Island prison, Tshua Khun-lim... Read More

Robert Aquinas McNally’s "Cast Out of Eden" is a detailed biography of American naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir. Born in Scotland, Muir arrived in the United States as a boy. He was brought by his father, who began a farm... Read More

Norman H. Finkelstein reviews the past and present fight against American antisemitism in "Saying No to Hate". Finkelstein notes that the first Jews settled in North America in the mid-1600s. Since then, he writes, the United States has... Read More

Zoë Bossiere’s "Cactus Country" is a sensitive, searching memoir about gender fluidity. Cactus Country is the Tucson trailer park where Bossiere lived as a child, all year round, in a harsh desert environment that taught them... Read More

Sejal Shah’s intrepid short story collection "How to Make Your Mother Cry" is a polysemous encounter connecting auditory and visual modes. Interspersed with ephemera—memory-photographs, childlike drawings, Indian dance notations, a... Read More

Set in the Netherlands, Jaap Robben’s novel "Afterlight" is about an elderly woman’s work to discover what happened to her child. In the book’s present, Frieda is in her eighties. After her husband, Louis, dies, she is deemed too... Read More

Set in the Canadian tundra and propelled by a twenty-five-year-old mystery, Gerard Beirne’s exquisite novel "The Thickness of Ice" is a love story that’s also about culpability and redemption. Jack, Wade’s best friend and a... Read More

The freedom to live life on its own terms is at stake in Omar Youssef Souleimane’s novel "The Last Syrian", about the Arab Spring in Syria. When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in desperation over the situation in his native... Read More