I want to begin this post with a short explanation. This blog post is a companion piece to a post I wrote last year about The Backstreets, the first Uyghur-authored* novel to be translated into English. That post briefly touches on the ongoing situation with the...
Evan Drellich's Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds created Sports' Biggest Mess is a book about baseball and a team that changed everything. There are several baseball teams that fans either really love or really hate. Whether it's the Yankees,...
For a number of years now, book publisher Akashic Books has been publishing collections of noir fiction short stories set in cities around the world. From Chicago and Miami, to far-flung cities such as Addis Ababa, Hong Kong, and Vancouver, these collections always...
“Please tell the people of your country, a child in the Congo dies every day so that they can plug in their phones.” Have you ever wondered how rechargeable batteries work? If you haven’t, you’re not alone. Rechargeable battery-powered devices have become ubiquitous...
In the summer of 2010, I was fortunate to have been part of a month-long study abroad program in China sponsored by my university. The program had us travel through China, following one of the paths of the historic Silk Road. Starting in Xian, the old imperial...
Every genre in literature has a subgenre within it that contains books that can be considered "comfort" or "cozy" reads, stories which are simply fun and don't require too much thought on the readers part. A cozy read helps readers like us get through those inevitable...
There is a phrase which appears over and over again in the novel The Cat who Saved Books that any book lover can instantly understand and appreciate: "Books have tremendous power." And it's true. Whether people like it or not, books do have tremendous power. But in...
When it comes to Jack London, you will mostly hear about his most famous stories, The Call of the Wild and White Fang. I haven't read those stories. In fact, I don't often read "classic" literature. I am unfortunately impatient when it comes to reading the...
Apocalyptic fiction is not a new genre. One could argue that it is one of literature's oldest genres. Ragnarok. The Revelations of John. The (often embellished) stories about the Mayan Long Count calendar and the year 2012. Whatever the story, people have always had a...
Weird Fiction is a difficult genre to describe, but you know it when you read it. Stories that get categorized as Weird Fiction often take place in a setting that is like our world, but is not our world. They feature characters that are like people we know, yet are...