Local author sharing family history through poetry
Date: January 2, 2024
A local author and Creative Writing professor at Fresno State is sharing her family history through poetry and written word. Click here to read more.
News & Reviews
News:
The 37 Best Books About Los Angeles Culture (and Beyond) Published In 2023
Date: January 2, 2024
Books change lives when they are read wholeheartedly and must be shared. This collection covers everything from L.A. noir to sci-fi to identity and poetry. Read, gift, and get inspired. […]
2023 Small Press Gift Guide
Date: December 12, 2023
BOMB looks back at the books from small and independent presses we featured in 2023 and helps you pair them with the idiosyncratic readers in your life. We’re grateful to […]
Francesca Bell Fearlessly Tackles the Unsettling in “What Small Sound” [INTERVIEW]
Date: December 12, 2023
Francesca Bell was raised in Washington and Idaho and settled as an adult in California. She did not complete middle school, high school, or college and holds no degrees. She […]
The Best Books We Read in 2023
Date: December 12, 2023
My picks are different than yours. Different than Jaylynn’s, than Tucker’s, than Joelene’s, than Andrea’s, than the New York Times. I love that about books. We couldn’t possibly read them all, […]
FLOPPY by ALYSSA GRAYBEAL is one of Library Journal’s “Best Memoirs & Biographies” of 2023!
Date: December 5, 2023
Graybeal’s book focuses on how her rare genetic connective-tissue disorder affects her daily life. She spills her emotions on the page as she is forced to navigate through life with […]
SECRET HARVESTS by David Mas Masumoto (illustrated by Patricia Wakida) is a finalist for the GOLDEN POPPY AWARDS in Nonfiction!
Date: November 30, 2023
Thank you so much to the California Independent Booksellers Alliance and CALIBA bookstore members!
Coco Picard, author of THE HEALING CIRCLE, interviews Mandy-Suzanne Wong for Electric Literature!
Date: November 21, 2023
In this comic interview, Mandy-Suzanne Wong talks about finding inspiration for her novel from a mundane household object. Click here to read more.
The New Yorker highlights ELISE PASCHEN’S BESTIARY in the importance of “telling Osage stories!”
Date: November 21, 2023
At the end of Anthony Lane’s review of “Killers of the Flower Moon”—Martin Scorsese’s new film about murders that were committed in the Osage Nation in the early twentieth century, […]
Snap Judgement Podcast highlights “Seeking Shizuko” from DAVID MAS MASUMOTO’S book SECRET HARVESTS
Date: November 20, 2023
A young girl was lost to her family. Torn away from them during their time in the Japanese-American prison camps, she was institutionalized and thought to be gone. But now, […]
Reviews:
Don’t let your child get the “summer slide”: TREE SPIRITS by Louise Wannier Reviewed in She Scribes
Date: August 7, 2025
This is not a reading book, however, it does encourage children to use their imaginations and “think outside the box.” That skill will help them later in life with critical […]
CHAGOS ARCHIPELAGO by Tom Lutz Featured in Publishers Weekly
Date: August 5, 2025
Troubled lives intersect in the Indian Ocean with explosive results in Lutz’s tantalizing follow-up to Born Slippy. Frank Baltimore worked in construction until one of his employees started laundering money and […]
Kirkus Reviews THE RE IN REFUGE by Adrianne Kalfopoulou
Date: August 4, 2025
A poignant and profoundly relevant examination of society’s safe places. In this essay collection, Kalfopoulou explores the notion of refuge in all its varied facets. “Embedded in the word refugee […]
CHAGOS ARCHIPELAGO by Tom Lutz Reviewed in Kirkus Reviews
Date: July 24, 2025
Four stories merge into one in this tale of politics and greed set in the Indian Ocean. No one can trust anyone in this incendiary tale of murder, espionage, and […]
This Isle Is Full of Noises: World Literature Today On Andrew Lam’s STORIES FROM THE EDGE OF THE SEA
Date: June 30, 2025
Twelve years ago, Andrew Lam, a writer and journalist who left Vietnam as “a plane person” at the end of the Vietnam War at the age of eleven, published Birds of Paradise […]
Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network Reviews STORIES FROM THE EDGE OF THE SEA by Andrew Lam
Date: June 18, 2025
In Stories from the Edges of the Sea, Andrew Lam writes not from the center of trauma but from its quieter afterlives. These are not conventional Vietnamese refugee stories. They emerge […]
Necessary Fiction Remarks on the Interplay Between “the Weird and the Mundane” in Their Glowing Review of Molly Olguín’s Debut Collection THE SEA GIVES UP THE DEAD
Date: June 17, 2025
The stories in The Sea Gives Up the Dead, Molly Olguín’s debut collection, are remarkable for the ways in which they skate between the weird and the mundane, the ordinary and […]
Didi Jackson’s MY INFINITY Featured in Seven Days’ Writeup On Vermont Books
Date: June 12, 2025
In her second poetry collection, Didi Jackson shifts among lyrical strategies, sometimes earthy and elsewhere mystical. An assistant professor at Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University, she spends part of the year in […]
Kirkus Reviews and Lara Ehrlich’s BIND ME TIGHTER STILL
Date: May 27, 2025
The relationship between Ceto—a siren who left her sisters and the ocean behind—and her 15-year-old daughter, Naia, is tested when Sirenland, their seaside burlesque attraction, is threatened by the untimely […]
Chapter House Journal Reviews Blood Wolf Moon by Elise Paschen
Date: May 22, 2025
In James, Percival Everett’s National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the character James writes, “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.” By doing […]