Michele Hutchinson, The Discomfort of Evening Norton)ĭeesha Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (West Virginia University Press)ĭouglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain (Grove Press) Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind (Ecco) –Anita Felliceli ( San Francisco Chronicle) It’s full of clever wordplay and in-jokes about the Chinese American experience … Interior Chinatown solders together mordant wit and melancholic whimsy to produce a moving exploration of race and assimilation that shouldn’t be missed by intellectually adventurous readers.” The novel skewers pop-culture stereotypes of Asian Americans and contends, memorably, with assimilation … Arranged in acts and told in the second person in the form of a screenplay, Interior Chinatown is bold, even groundbreaking, in its form.

“Charles Yu was a story editor for Westworld, and his bracingly metafictive second novel, Interior Chinatown, takes the theme of social roles beautifully sideways. Recognizes an outstanding work of literary fiction by a United States citizen. Its starkness and irresolution recalls the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s point that the opposite of forgetting is not merely remembrance. A reverence for the victims can be detected in this refusal to sensationalize their suffering … Whitehead has written novels of horror and apocalypse nothing touches the grimness of the real stories he conveys here, of a cinder-block building that still stands, a school that was closed only eight years ago. The ordinary language, the clear pane of his prose, lets the stories speak for themselves … while Whitehead is frank about the barbarity his characters endure, there are few scenes of explicit violence-most of it happens offstage. Whitehead comports himself with gravity and care, the steward of painful, suppressed histories his choices on the page can feel as much ethical as aesthetic. Even if your prose taste runs to curlicue and adornment (mine does), the restraint feels significant. The narration is disciplined and the sentences plain and sturdy, oars cutting into water.

“ The Nickel Boys-a tense, nervy performance-is even more rigorously controlled than its predecessor.

Middlegame novel