Sana Krasikov is the author of the short story collection One More Year
Sea of Poppies by Ami-tav Ghosh. I was reading my nephew The Neverending Story when I picked up Sea of Poppies. In some ways it’s exactly that sort of adventure book for adults. It opens on the eve of the British “Opium War” with China and moves on to Calcutta, Bengal, various colonial Asian ports and villages where poppies are cultivated and processed into opium. It’s the first book in what’s going to be a trilogy.
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (This book will be out in April 2009). I’m reading a galley of Tower’s stories after a self-imposed moratorium on short stories. There’s just something about the way Tower throws you smack in the middle of his characters’ lives that I love. No preliminaries. The wonderful bluntness of it reminds me a bit of another totally irreverent collection I read and enjoyed a few years ago, Josh Furst’s Short People.
The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez. One of the smartest and most thoughtful books I read this year – as much social history as novel. About two Barnard Roommates coming into their own at the tail end of the sixties. Don’t be misled by the “young adult” looking cover – Nunez’s book is anything but. It should be required reading for anybody trying to understand the mixed and complex legacy of feminism in America.
