Category: Books
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Bookshelf: My Mini-Course on Detroit
When I decided to move to southeastern Michigan—a place I had never been before—I realized I needed to learn more about the region, especially its history. I live in Ann Arbor, but there aren’t too many books written about Ann Arbor (I checked). Detroit, on the other hand, has long been an object of authorial…
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Bookshelf: All the Single Ladies
By the time I finished reading the introduction to journalist Rebecca Traister’s new tour de force, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, I had highlighted so much that I started to wonder if highlighting was a meaningless activity. Every paragraph offered something I wanted to remember and return…
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Bookshelf — Knitlandia, by Clara Parkes
I read a lot of books about knitting, and a lot of books about travel, but I’ve never read a travel book about knitting before. There’s a reason for that, as Amazon tells me that this might be a genre with precisely one title in it: Knitlandia: A Knitter Sees the World, recently published by…
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Romance in Hong Kong, Both Light and Dark
When thinking about the world’s most romantic cities, Paris and New York probably leap to mind—they are, after all, familiar settings for romantic comedies and novels. But a new book and movie, both released this weekend in tandem with Valentine’s Day, use Hong Kong as the backdrop for their love stories and prove that the…
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Ms. Magazine blog: “The Faulty Logic of China’s Most Radical Experiment”
I have a new post at the Ms. Magazine blog, a review of journalist Mei Fong’s recent book, One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment. An excerpt: On Oct. 29, 2015, the Chinese government announced that it was moving away from the one-child policy it had enacted more than 35 years before. After nearly four decades…
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LA Review of Books China Blog: Let 100 Voices Speak
My latest LA Review of Books China Blog post went up on the site last week, but I was away on a work trip and didn’t have time to link to it until now. In the post, I interview Liz Carter, a Washington, D.C.-based translator and author of Let 100 Voices Speak: How the Internet…
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LA Review of Books: The Spy Game’s Afoot
While I really enjoy television shows that tell spy stories (Alias, Chuck, The Americans), I very rarely read spy novels. They tend, I’ve found, to be long and tedious: covert action that can be carried out fairly quickly and clearly on screen often takes many pages to describe in print. But I’ve thoroughly enjoyed two spy novels…
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LA Review of Books: There Be Dragons
I have said here previously how much I enjoyed Dragon Day, the final volume in Lisa Brackmann’s Ellie McEnroe crime thriller trilogy. This week at the LA Review of Books China Blog, I review the book in more detail: Dragon Day sees Ellie attempting to stay in the good graces of her biggest — and scariest —…
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LA Review of Books: “Expat Identities”
Following up on my recent LA Review of Books China Blog interview with Shannon Young, I have a new post at the site reviewing How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia, which Young edited: Many of the anthology’s contributors speak of being changed for the better by their time abroad,…
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LA Review of Books: Q&A with Shannon Young, Author of “Year of Fire Dragons”
I have a new post up at the LA Review of Books China Blog, in which I interview Hong Kong-based author Shannon Young: Young, however, didn’t originally plan to spend her life writing; she wanted to be an editor. But after graduating from college in 2009, she found many of her plans upended. Publishing jobs…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 