K: A Novel offers a gripping, nuanced exploration of how imprisonment tests a writer–mentally, physically, and morally. Just as compelling is how the novel conveys the writer’s need for self-expression, which never diminishes, even under the most trying circumstances.
In so many stories of women’s murders, both fictional and nonfictional, the emphasis is on the crime and killer, with the women portrayed as little more than victims. Often, we get little sense of who they were and how their loss affects their friends, loved ones, or the wider community. Cathy Ulrich’s arresting new story collection, Ghosts of You, turns this narrative frame on its head, resulting in fiction that is, by turns, haunting, thought-provoking, and deeply moving.
In her absorbing début novel, Degrees of Difficulty, Julie E. Justicz offers a powerful, nuanced, and multidimensional portrayal of the struggles of caring for a profoundly disabled family member, and of the lasting consequences for everyone involved.
At the center of the novel is Ben Novotny, born with a chromosomal disorder that results in severe mental disability and a susceptibility to frequent, life-endangering seizures. Over the years, the demands of his care exact a steep toll on both of his parents, Caroline and Perry, but they react to the stress in markedly different ways.
In many coming-of-age novels, parents are absent, literally or figuratively. But one of the many distinctions of Elizabeth Earley’s dazzling and incisive new novel, Like Wings, Your Hands, is the interconnectedness of the two central characters: fourteen-year-old Marko and his mother, Kalina. Despite this close connection, Kalina remains a mystery to Marko, a frustration that leads him to make transformative discoveries about her, himself, and a grandfather he’s never met.
In her reflective and lyrical début novel, As a River, Sion Dayson explores the hazards of secrets. Whether kept or revealed, they can exact a profound toll: on those who carry them and on those who either remain in the dark or are made to confront new–and potentially life-changing–truths. With deep feeling, Dayson traces these consequences across lives and generations, portraying how those affected cope–sometimes by strengthening old bonds or forming new ones.
Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Grace Talusan’s memoir The Body Papers is, to quote writer Mia Alvar, “an extraordinary portrait of the artist as survivor.”
At age 2, Grace moved with her family from the Philippines to a suburb of Boston, where she became adrift between two worlds. On the one hand, she was made to feel “other” in her predominantly white neighborhood and school; on the other hand, she lost touch with her native language and culture, discovering what happens when “assimilation brings erasure.” In time, Grace confronted additional, traumatizing difficulties: the realization that her family’s residency status was “illegal,” making deportation an ever-present risk; sexual abuse by her paternal grandfather; and in later years, the discovery that she has a gene that makes carriers susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer. Consequently, she had to decide whether, as a preventive measure, to have her breasts and ovaries removed.
In her affecting and fiercely honest memoir, Grace breaks the silence that long surrounded these traumas, discovering what Kirkus Reviews describes as “the healing power of speaking the unspeakable.”
In interviews with the East Coast Asian American Student Union, Fiction Advocate, and The Rumpus, Grace has answered a wide range of questions about The Body Papers, discussing how the book came about, how she connected the various threads of her story, and the care she took in integrating information about living family members. Here, she responds to questions about the process of writing and revising The Body Papers, among other topics. (Full disclosure: Grace, a dear friend, has offered invaluable advice to me as I’ve written and revised my own novels.)