The Word Book
10 best books like The Word Book (Mieko Kanai): Kitchen, Birthday, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, Goodbye Tsugumi, Don't Date Rosa Santos, Where Reasons End, Hotel Iris, The Housekeeper and the Professor, The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
| Author | Banana Yoshimoto |
| ISBN | 0802142443 |
Banana Yoshimoto's novels have made her a sensation in Japan and all over the world, and Kitchen, the dazzling English-language debut that is still her best-loved book, is an enchantingly original and deeply affecting book about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives...
| Author | Meredith Russo |
| ISBN | 1250129834 |
Boyhood meets The Sun Is Also a Star in this unconventional love story by award-winning author Meredith Russo!
Two kids, Morgan and Eric, are bonded for life after being born on the same day at the same time. We meet them once a year on their shared birthday as they grow and change: as Eric figures...
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
| Author | Audre Lorde |
| ISBN | 0895941414 |
A collection of fifteen essays written between 1976 and 1984 gives clear voice to Audre Lorde's literary and philosophical personae. These essays explore and illuminate the roots of Lorde's intellectual development and her deep-seated and longstanding concerns about ways of increasing empowerment...
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes
Hiroshima-born Sadako is lively and athletic--the star of her school's running team. And then the dizzy spells start. Soon gravely ill with leukemia, the "atom bomb disease," Sadako faces her future with spirit and bravery. Recalling a Japanese legend, Sadako sets to work folding paper cranes. For...
| Author | Banana Yoshimoto |
| ISBN | 0571212794 |
Banana Yoshimoto's novels of young life in Japan have made her an international sensation. Goodbye Tsugumi is an offbeat story of a deep and complicated friendship between two female cousins that ranks among her best work. Maria is the only daughter of an unmarried woman. She has grown up at the seaside...
| Author | Nina Moreno |
| ISBN | 1368039707 |
Rosa Santos is cursed by the sea-at least, that's what they say. Dating her is bad news, especially if you're a boy with a boat.
But Rosa feels more caught than cursed. Caught between cultures and choices. Between her abuela, a beloved healer and pillar of their community, and her mother, an artist...
A brilliant writer imagines a fictional conversation between a mother and the teenage son she lost to suicide. Yiyun Li confronts grief and transforms it into art, in a book of surprising beauty and love.
The narrator writes, "I had but one delusion, which I held onto with all my willpower: we...
| Author | Yōko Ogawa |
| ISBN | 0312425244 |
A tale of twisted love from Yoko Ogawa—author of The Diving Pool and The Housekeeper and the Professor.
In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to...
The Housekeeper and the Professor
| Author | Yōko Ogawa |
| ISBN | 0312427808 |
He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem--ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.
She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.
And every morning, as the Professor and...
The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
| Author | Yōko Ogawa |
| ISBN | 0312426836 |
From Akutagawa Award-winning author Yoko Ogawa comes a haunting trio of novellas about love, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures may contain a hairline crack of cruel intent. A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster brother as she watches him leap from a high diving...
Sinister forces draw together a cast of desperate characters in this eerie and absorbing novel from Yoko Ogawa.
An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Years later, the writer’s stepson reflects upon his stepmother and the...
Toddler-Hunting & Other Stories
| Author | Taeko Kōno |
| ISBN | 0811213919 |
"A sense of unease permeates this disturbing and exceptional collection of stories centered on unhappy women in postwar Japan...," wrote Publishers Weekly. World Literature Today proclaimed: "Reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’s works, Kono’s stories explore the dark, terrifying...
The award-winning poet Anne Carson reinvents a genre in Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.
Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red...
The Passion According to G.H.
| Author | Clarice Lispector |
| ISBN | 0816617120 |
Aficionados of South American fiction as well as literary critics will welcome this posthumous translation of a nearly plotless novel by one of Brazil's foremost writers. Availing herself of a single character, Lispector transforms a banal situation—a woman at home, alone—into an amphitheater...
Ground Zero, Nagasaki: Stories
| Author | Yuichi Seirai |
| ISBN | 0231171161 |
Set in contemporary Nagasaki, the six short stories in this collection draw a chilling portrait of the ongoing trauma of the detonation of the atomic bomb. Whether they experienced the destruction of the city directly or heard about it from survivors, the characters in these tales filter their pain...
Herr Nakano und die Frauen
| Author | Hiromi Kawakami |
| ISBN | 3446232745 |
»Wir handeln nicht mit Antiquitäten, wir handeln mit Trödel«, sagt Herr Nakano zu Hitomi, die sich um eine Aushilfsstelle in seinem Laden bewirbt. Der eigenwillige Nakano, ein Herr alter Schule, liebt neben schönen alten Dingen auch schöne junge Frauen. Sein Geschäft, eine Enklave in der...
My daughter came home for a college break with this novel, which she was given for free on campus. She passed it on to me, saying it was a “gorgeous read,” and that she had hoped to write a review but didn't have the time. Which is where Mom comes in …
Just finished it, and, well -- like daughter...
| Author | Mónica Lavín |
| ISBN | 6070712501 |
Ocultas de la vida pública y, si acaso, ligeramente turbadas por los murmullos de los enterados, algunas de las pasiones amorosas más emblemáticas del agitado siglo xx en México vivieron alejadas de las miradas inquisitorias. Artistas, intelectuales y políticos cuya obra y decisiones...
