ReadingEast

In Starstruck: A Memoir of Astrophysics and Finding Light in the Dark, Egyptian American astrophysicist SARAFINA EL-BADRY NANCE shares how she carved out a place in her field, grounding herself in a lifelong love of the stars to face life’s inevitable challenges and embrace the unknown. In ELIO MORILLO’s The Boy Who Reached the Stars: A Memoir, he chronicles an itinerant childhood and unique journey from the farthest expanse of human endeavor – space – to AI and robotics.…

JON CLINCH’s historical The General and Julia: A Novel explores how Ulysses S. Grant’s views on race and Reconstruction changed over time. In AANCHAL MALHOTRA’s The Book of Everlasting Things: A Novel, a perfumer’s apprentice and a calligrapher’s apprentice make a series of fateful decisions that will change the course of their lives forever. In KIRTHANA RAMISETTI’s Advika and the Hollywood Wives, a shocking stipulation in an ex-wife’s will compels a man’s current wife to investigate her new husband.…

In First Gen: A Memoir, ALEJANDRA CAMPOVERDI retraces her trajectory as a Mexican American woman raised by an immigrant single mother in Los Angeles with candor and heart. In AVA CHIN’s Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming, she traces her decadeslong quest to understand her family’s story, from the Pearl River Delta to a Mott Street building in New York’s Chinatown. In A Living Remedy: A Memoir,…

On Defiant Dreams: The Journey of an Afghan Girl Who Risked Everything for Education, Indian American human rights activist MALAINA KAPOOR and Afghani mathematician SOLA MAHFOUZ share the story of Mahfouz’s extraordinary escape from her Taliban-ordained future. In SAFIYA SINCLAIR’s How to Say Babylon: A Memoir, she shares her struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing and find her own voice as a woman and poet, which stemmed from an inevitable collision course between her and her strict patriarchal father.…

In Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome, comedian APARNA NANCHERLA delivers a collection of essays marked by her signature humor, sharing hilarious and incredibly insightful meditations on body image, productivity culture, the ultra-meme-ability of mental health language, and who, exactly, gets to make art “about nothing.” In her memoir Living My Best Life, Hun: Following Your Dreams is No Joke, LONDON HUGHES recounts disastrous experiences in friendships, relationships, and career choices, but reminds readers that however bad things get,…

In The Wishing Pool and Other Stories, TANANARIVE DUE’s second collection of short fiction, there are classic tales of horror, several stories set in a Florida town, and two sections of post-apocalyptic futures. From the mysterious, magical town of Gracetown to the aftermath of a pandemic (chillingly, written before 2020), Due masterfully evokes a sense of dread and fear, balanced with heart and hope. Buy The Wishing Pool and Other Stories. – Due   Sponsored by…

The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America is SAKET SONI’s gripping account of migrant workers trapped in squalid Gulf Coast “man camps” in 2006, who against all odds remained steadfast in their heroic journey for justice. In RACHEL L. SWARNS’ The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church, she offers a groundbreaking story of nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States.…

In DUNYA MIKHAIL’s The Bird Tattoo: A Novel, a young Yazidi woman’s life is changed forever when her husband, a journalist, goes missing, and her search for him results in her captivity. In JAMILA MINNICKS’ Moonrise Over New Jessup: A Novel, a young woman who flees to a 1950s all-Black town in Alabama falls in love with a man who challenges the town’s long-standing status, actions that could lead to the couple’s expulsion – or worse.…

ALLEGRA GOODMAN’s Sam: A Novel is the story of a 7-year-old with a nearly absent father and a mother struggling to make ends meet. But all Sam wants to do is climb, hang from the highest limbs of the tallest trees, and scale the side of a building. In JESS ROW’s The New Earth: A Novel, a family reckons with the harms of the past and confronts an uncertain future. And in THRITY UMRIGAR’s The Museum of Failures: A Novel,…

In NIGAR ALAM‘s Under the Tamarind Tree: A Novel, it is 1964 in Karachi, Pakistan, and Rozeena is about to lose her home as the lives of her childhood best friends seem to be unraveling. Fifty-five years later, she receives a call – and a voice she never thought she’d hear again unearths long-buried secrets. In ETAF RUM’s Evil Eye: A Novel – a striking exploration of the expectations of Palestinian American women – when Yara is placed on probation at work for fighting with a racist coworker,…

Fire Index: Poems by BETHANY BREITLAND measures the interior life of a survivor against the world she creates through her own fractured marriage, motherhood, and religion, reckoning with her complicit, and often dishonest life to demand her full attention, forgiveness, and responsibility. Drawing its title from the 1863 federal act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands, Removal Acts: Poems by ERIN MARIE LYNCH reckons with the present-day repercussions of historical violence, assembling an intimate record of recovery from bulimia and insisting that self-erasure cannot be separated from the erasures of genocide.…

The collection comprising JAMEL BRINKLEY‘s Witness: Stories are set in New York City and feature a range of characters – from children to grandmothers­ – living the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. RU FREEMAN addresses subjects as diverse as Bowie and Dylan, personal and cultural identity, and #MeToo in Bon Courage: Essays on Inheritance, Citizenship, and a Creative Life, and explores crossing borders, both real and imagined, in Sleeping Alone: Stories.…