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:
Under Nushagak Bluff and the shadow of pandemic in Alaska literature: Review of Mia C. Heavener’s debut novel
Date: September 3, 2020
Seagulls swoop and dive, crying in the salty air. The waves of Nushagak Bay crash on sandbars and rocky shores. Machines rattle the warehouses on the cannery side of the […]
Don’t Go Crazy Without Me: A Tragicomic Memoir
Date: August 31, 2020
Reading Deborah Lott’s memoir of her dysfunctional upbringing feels like the literary equivalent of rubbernecking: her childhood was a series of trainwrecks, but somehow you can’t stop turning around to watch. […]
High Skies
Date: August 31, 2020
Daugherty’s engrossing latest (after the collection American Originals) focuses on the small community of Midland, Tex., in the late 1950s as it reels from severe weather, Cold War paranoia, and school […]
Publishers Weekly Review: Unseen City by Amy Shearn
Date: August 19, 2020
Shearn’s luminous latest (after The Mermaid from Brooklyn) follows a self-avowed librarian spinster; a man researching the history of his father’s Crown Heights, Brooklyn, home; and the ghost of an orphaned […]
A Point of Change
Date: August 17, 2020
Aimee Liu’s Glorious Boy gives readers a portrait of a young mother and fledgling anthropologist caught in a remote outpost in the midst of World War Two. Two of Liu’s three previous […]
EL GRUÑIDO QUIETO DE LOS CERDOS: LA ALEGORÍA POSMODERNA DE JOHANNA STOBEROCK. ELIDIO LA TORRE LAGARES
Date: August 10, 2020
En la novela Cerdos, de Johanna Stoberock, hay una isla innombrada en algún mar desconocido, cuatro niños se dan a la tarea de recoger la basura que llega a la orilla […]
Each Story is a Kaleidoscope in ‘Boy Oh Boy’
Date: August 3, 2020
The stories in Boy Oh Boy by Zachary Doss are playful, surreal, sometimes dark, and always magical. This wonderful collection of inventive queer fabulist stories and flash fictions won the 2018 Grace […]
Past as Place in Subduction
Date: July 30, 2020
In Kristen Millares Young’s Subduction, one of the main characters, Peter, a member of the Makah tribe, talks about the past as a physical place that can hold you. In the […]
Human Touch: Sex & Taipei City by Yu-Han Chao
Date: July 29, 2020
The Taipei of Yu-Han Chao’s debut story collection Sex & Taipei City both bustles and glistens. It’s a city of industry and aspiration—skyscrapers and metro trains, prep schools and department stores. Yet […]
Review: Open the Dark by Marie Tozier
Date: July 27, 2020
Marie Tozier’s new book, Open the Dark, is a lyrical guide to the life in Northwest Alaska experienced by the Iñupiaq poet and her family. It touches on themes that can be […]