Intricate details make this heist-centered crime story literary and memorable. Leonard Chang’s novel "The Lockpicker" is a bit of a hybrid—a pulp crime novel that also becomes a story about the effects of a violent upbringing on an... Read More

With careful settings and raw seams, "The Train to Orvieto" is a fascinating journey of sins come home to roost. "The Train to Orvieto" details a Midwestern ingenue’s love for art—as narrated by her daughter—and the folly that... Read More

Striking, deeply honest, and sensitively told, this novel based in real life considers juvenile prisons and all its dramas. Jerome Gold calls In the Spider’s Web a “nonfiction novel.” In it, he depicts the routines and characters... Read More

Death, resurrection, and change are woven into the narrative of Talkhoon’s personal experiences during her country’s upheaval. Farnoosh Moshiri’s latest novel is set during the 1979 Iranian revolution against its monarchy. "The... Read More

It is rare that a book is palatable like a well-sauced scaloppini that demands to be enjoyed slowly, bite by bite. "Early Pleasures" by Frederick Kohner is such a book. Kohner was born in Bohemia in 1905 in a family and place that,... Read More

Huu Tri was a young lieutenant serving in the South Vietnamese army when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975. As an employee of the “Old Government,” he and others like him were viewed as a threat to the incoming communist... Read More

When a young man is given everything at once-a good family, good luck, happiness and good standing among his peers-there often can only be room for misfortune to join the “everything” that man has been given. Oscar Moreira is a... Read More