The Buddha in the Attic

By Julie Otsuka.  New York: Knopf, 2011.  129 pp.

Otsuka’s intense and gorgeous The Buddha in the Attic was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award.  Described as a novel, it reads like a book-length prose poem told in the voices of a multitude of Japanese “picture brides” who arrived in San Francisco in the early 20^th century.

The first section of the book introduces the unusual narrative voice as the women compare photographs of their new husbands and speculate about the lives they will find in America:

Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam

Edited by Linh Dihn.  New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996, 2006.  172 pp.

The stories of Night, Again reflect a contemporary Vietnam, one far removed from the images we may retain of the country from American memoirs and films.  The American War appears several times in this remarkably diverse selection, in tales of bombings and veterans and even as a sort of specter in Do Khiem’s “The Pre-War Atmosphere,” which, though set in California and focused on memories of the Palestinian conflict, features a Vietnamese narrator longing for a time before war.  But ordinary life is here as well, in domestic drama and coming of age stories and deathbed confessions.

Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam

By Andrew X. Pham.  New York: Picador Books, 1999.  344 pp.

Andrew Pham was born in Vietnam and escaped to the U.S. with his family in the late 70s.  This memoir tells the story of his return to Vietnam, to tour the country on his bicycle, intertwined with his memories of the war and his family’s life in California.  The travelogue is haunted by his younger self, An, and his young parents; an American vet named Tyle, who he meets briefly on a bike tour through the Mexican desert; and especially his lost sister, Chi.

World and Town

By Gish Jen.  New York: Knopf, 2010.  386 pp.

Hattie Kong has moved to Riverlake, a small town in New England, following the deaths of her husband and best friend.  Daughter of an American missionary and a Chinese father, Hattie escaped the Communist revolution in China for Iowa, staying with her mother’s family.  She is later taken in by the Hatch family, becomes a scientist, marries, has a child.  In Riverlake she is haunted by all of her pasts, including the family burial ground at Qufu, which Hattie “grew up dutifully sweeping. . .every spring,” the deaths of Joe and Lee, and the affair that reframed both her personal and professional lives.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

By Walter Mosley.  New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.  277 pp.

Several years ago, I overhead colleagues debating the literary merits of Walter Mosley’s work.  One stated definitively that Mosley’s novels were pulp fiction, but his short stories were literary.  It was an argument no one was going to win, least of all Walter Mosley, and it’s an argument that quickly becomes ridiculous if applied to the works of, for example, Edgar Allan Poe or Charles Dickens.  The insurmountable divide between popular works and literature is a fiction, and a not very useful one.  But I hope that after his 34 books and numerous awards, we can all agree that Walter Mosley is a writer worth reading.  If you only know him from his Easy Rawlins or Leonid McGill mysteries, though, Ptolemy Grey will be a revelation.

Uke Rivers Delivers

By R. T. Smith.  Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2006.  142 pp.

In this amazingly eclectic collection of short stories, R. T. Smith demonstrates his talent for fiction, though he is perhaps better known for his poetry.  These fifteen stories explore the killing of John Wilkes Booth, the capture of Jefferson Davis, and the lives of more ordinary folk, though Smith reveals the extraordinary in each character.

The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia

By Mary Helen Stefaniak.  New York: Norton, 2010.  342 pp.

Fans of Bailey White will likely enjoy The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia, which tells, through the eyes of eleven-year-old Gladys Cailiff,  the story of a school teacher who shakes up a small southern town.  The Works Progress Administration brings Miss Grace Paley to Threestep, Georgia in 1938, and she quickly wins hearts and irritates the establishment by smoking, wearing hiking boots, and ignoring segregation laws and customs.

The Crows of Pearblossom

By Aldous Huxley. New York: Random House, 1967. Illustrated by Barbara Cooney

Aldous Huxley wrote The Crows of Pearblossom for his niece, Olivia, and one of the charms of the story is the way that Huxley works Olivia’s home in to the story, as well as the names of people and towns with which she would be familiar. As the story opens, Mrs. Crow is frustrated by her inability to hatch an egg. Every afternoon, when she goes to the grocery store, the egg she has laid disappears. Mrs. Crow soon learns that a snake is taking the eggs, and when she asks her husband to kill the snake, Mr. Crow and his friend Mr. Owl hatch a less dangerous plan.

Bye, Bye, Black Sheep

By Ayelet Waldman.  New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 2006. 259 pp.

Detective Juliet Applebaum’s client in Bye, Bye, Black Sheep is a tall, lovely woman named Heavenly who began life as Henry.  Heavenly is trying to solve the murder of her sister, Violetta, a drug user and prostitute.  When the police fail to take the case seriously, Juliet finds herself getting to know the girls of Figueroa Street and their pimps, watching the “desperate cotillion, partners changing, passed from hand to hand” (61).

Watermark

By Vanitha Sankaran.  New York: Avon, 2010. 322 pp.

Watermark begins as a rather lurid historical romance: in the winter of 1300, in Narbonne, in the south of France, a mother dies giving birth to a girl who is so pale that the midwife’s apprentice assumes she is a product of the devil or witchcraft.  From its earliest pages, the novel rings with terror of the Inquisition and its threat to the poor and defenseless.  But the girl, Auda, is born to a papermaker, and Sankaran’s grim view of medieval France is tempered with fascination for the new medium that will bring printed texts, both sacred and secular, to all.