Americanah
Americanah is the third novel by Nigerian-born Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It’s the story of Ifemelu, a young middle class woman who, due to the many strikes that have disrupted her university at home,...
View ArticleThe gulfs in marriage and home: Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri
I am so grateful to a couple of blogger friends who recently urged me to move Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri up on my reading list. This book had been sitting on my shelves unread for maybe...
View ArticleDisillusionment in marriage, home, and life: The Buddha in the Attic, by...
The Buddha in the Attic is Julie Otsuka’s 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novella about Japanese picture brides trying to start new lives in California during the first half of the 20th century. The...
View ArticleLove, loyalty, hurt and anger – the powerful world of mother-daughter...
I am so honored to be contributing to the wonderful writer D.A. Wolf’s series on mother-daughter relationships. This was by far the hardest piece of writing I have ever done, and more than once I asked...
View ArticleA Literary Trip Down Memory Lane, from Girlhood to Midlife
It’s my birthday week. Though I’m in far less celebratory spirits than I was when I turned, say, 21 or 25, I’ve made the decision to not rain on my own parade. So in celebration of my, er, maturity, I...
View ArticleCultural Loss Over the Years
Tomorrow is the Lunar New Year or, as we’ve been calling it for many years, Chinese New Year. My memories of this holiday growing up are vivid. My mother would spend days scouring the house from top to...
View ArticleMy Battles with Anxiety
I have to thank one of my readers/blogger friends for mentioning in a comment once that she suffers from anxiety. It was her honesty that emboldened me to acknowledge my own relationship with anxiety....
View ArticleOn Loss and Hope: Drown, by Junot Díaz
. The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don’t belong to English though I belong nowhere else –Gustavo Pérez...
View ArticleAn Evening with Khaled Hosseini
I was lucky enough to get a seat at Khaled Hosseini’s recent book tour for the paperback launch of And the Mountains Echoed. I first read Khaled (I’ll take the liberty of calling him by his first name...
View ArticleWhat Matters Most in Life: We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas
We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas is frequently touted as a novel about the American Dream but I’d like to think of it as a story about what it means to define meaning and happiness in one’s life,...
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