Author Archives: Kasia Bartoszynska

My friend Annashay recommended this as an audiobook — Neko Case reads it herself — and I was pleasantly surprised by how different it was from what I expected. What I ultimately came to really appreciate (though it threw me at first) was how the book as only very loosely bound to an overarching narrative.ContinueContinue reading “The Harder I Fight, the More I Love You, Neko Case”

This is a cool, strange book — a story of three women and their friendship over the years, but also, unexpectedly, a work of sci-fi that sketches a vision of the future that awaits us. Each section is so distinct — different narrator, different span of time, different focus — but they also connect inContinueContinue reading “Memory Piece, Lisa Ko”

This is a really interesting novel about ambition and marriage. Also writing, and especially writing for tv, though the Hollywood industry part was more stressful than appealing for me. But this core problem of being in a marriage that has its problems but also its joys and comforts, where you and your partner seem toContinueContinue reading “Colored Television, Danzy Senna”

A quietly devastating, but absolutely riveting, book. It begins with the suicide of a woman stricken with grief over her daughter’s disappearance, intertwining her story with those of her remaining children, and that of a young pregnant woman who witnesses her leap into the sea. It’s a brilliantly unsettling story. The city is never named,ContinueContinue reading “The Singularity, Balsam Karam, tr. Saskia Vogel”

This is a remarkable book about the difficulties of understanding King Lear, and also 20th-century Chinese history. It turns out that thinking about them alongside each other is both illuminating and clarifying. Not in the sense that anything is totally explained, but rather that some of the strangeness is distilled; it becomes possible to articulateContinueContinue reading “The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear, Nan Da”

This is a real slow burn of a novel. Very short (only 116 pages!) but it feels like a gradual buildup, layering different perspectives and moments in time. It was a fascinating contrast to another novel I read recently and was blown away by, Mikołaj Grynberg’s Poufne: both are stories of multiple generations, and howContinueContinue reading “Years and Years, Hwang Jungeun, tr. Janet Hong”

This is terrific — wry, bristly, surprising. It’s a story about a woman, the titular Sister Deborah (though she will prove to have many names throughout the book) who comes to Rwanda from the US and gains a reputation as a miracle worker, unsettling local power dynamics. It’s also the story of a woman whoContinueContinue reading “Sister Deborah, Scholastique Mukasonga, tr. Mark Polizotti”

August is Women in Translation month (aka #WiTMonth), which I am a big fan of, so I meant to only post about books in translation by women, or translated by women, but I also have a bit of a backlog of books I’m finished and haven’t written about so best laid plans, etc. I boughtContinueContinue reading “Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie”

I read this in one sitting on a long flight and it was very satisfying. Mrs Dalloway is one of my all-time favorite novels so I am quite leery of re-tellings, but this one is effective, precisely because it doesn’t cleave too closely to the original (if you didn’t know, you might not even thinkContinueContinue reading “The Days of Afrekete, Asali Solomon”

What I kept thinking as I read this was man, Adichie really despises academics, and has a special place of rage reserved for ‘woke’ African American scholars. She is absolutely vicious skewering the hypocrisy and self-congratulatory elitism of Americans lecturing Africans about race. And while some of the critique is no doubt valid, it readsContinueContinue reading “Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie”