Category: underappreciated books
“Lalita Noronha’s Where Monsoons Cry is an enlightening read,” Susan Muaddi Darraj says. “It’s a vibrant collection of short stories spanning two continents, from India to North America. The heroines of Noronha’s stories are young Indian and Indian-American women, grappling with the cultural clash they face upon immigration, as well as the economic, social, and patriarchal issues that challenge them at home. These stories form a complex, colorful lens that offers a view into the lives of women who struggle to find a home in between the cultural divide. Noronha’s writing is layered, colorful, and poetic. A recommended read.”
Susan Muaddi Darraj is the editor of Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing, and the managing editor of The Baltimore Review. Her essays and fiction have appeared in anthologies such as Colonize This!, Catching a Wave and Dinarzad’s Children
“I just finished The Night Country by Stewart O’Nan,” Tinti says. “It’s amazing the best book I’ve read in a while. I heard O’Nan give a reading from it at the Brattleboro Literary Festival in October. Since The Night Country was one of the few books of O’Nan’s that I hadn’t picked up yet, I bought a copy to read when I got home. It turned out to be the perfect Halloween novel: A group of five teenagers are in a terrible car accident in a New England town. Three of them are killed. Two survive. Now here’s the cool part the book is narrated from the point of view of the dead teenagers. It sounds impossible to pull off, but Stewart O’Nan handles it brilliantly. His writing is just plain beautiful, heartbreaking and threaded with sharp black humor. The story picks up year later the first anniversary of the crash Halloween, of course, and the ghosts are zipping in and out of people’s heads. Then it gets really exciting one of the living teenagers, Tim, is planning on re-creating the crash, killing himself and the other survivor, a boy named Kyle who is now brain-damaged. Throw into the mix Officer Brooks, the policeman trying to stop it from happening again, and Kyle’s mom, whose life has been turned upside down by her son’s disability, and you have an emotionally gripping, white-knuckle countdown literary thriller.”
Hannah Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts. Her short story collection, Animal Crackers, was published by the Dial Press in March 2004. She is currently the editor of One Story magazine.
“Most people have never heard of H. Lee Barnes,” Goldberg says. “It’s a shame, really, because he’s writing some of the most compelling fiction around. His first collection of short fiction, Gunning For Ho, published by the University of Nevada Press a few years ago, was a dense and emotional selection of Vietnam war fiction that presented a voice as fresh and as frightening as any I’ve read in the past. But it is his epic novel The Lucky (also published by the University of Nevada Press) that truly shows Barnes at his best as it weaves the sordid tale of Pete Elkins and Willy Bobbins, through the streets of Las Vegas, the ranches of Montana and the jungles of Southeast Asia. H. Lee Barnes is an American original, a writer’s writer if there ever was one, and one who New York should stop ignoring.”
Tod Goldberg is the author of the novels Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Fake Liar Cheat, which was not a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, but which many black-clad 17 year olds seem to like. His short fiction has been published widely in journals and magazines across the country and his weekly column in the Las Vegas Mercury has twice won the Nevada Press Association Prize for column writing.
Laughter Made from Experience by Lola Gillebaard.
“The book is a collection of vignettes about one woman’s life: getting married, raising four sons, surviving breast cancer, and everything else in between,” Dumas says. “Gillebaard has a natural writing style that makes you feel like you are having coffee with a wise aunt, someone who has lived a full life and has the gift of recounting it with humor and warmth. She does not have a publicist or big publishing house promoting her book. It was one of those great finds that makes you realize that ordinary people often make the best subjects.”
Firoozeh Dumas was born in Ibadan, Iran and moved to America at the age of seven. She is the author of the memoir Funny in Farsi: Growing Up Iranian in America.
This week I’m starting a new, regular feature, which will appear every Tuesday on Moorishgirl. I’ll be asking readers, writers, editors, critics, librarians, or booksellers to weigh in on a book they loved, but which has remained underappreciated. If you’d like to participate, send me mail.