by Nania Lee
Apparently, everyone got the memo on American Born Chinese before I did. Published in 2006, Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel is flush with accolades: a National Book Award Finalist, winner of the Michael L Printz Award, and a “top” pick of multiple publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Time Magazine, and Publisher’s Weekly. Where was I? What was I doing in 2006 that I missed its release? How had I overlooked this amazing graphic novel, while somehow convincing myself to read the first installment of a melodramatic teen-vampire-romance-novel-series that shall go unnamed. I hang my head in shame.
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by Richard Tillinghast
While I loathe the frantic search for expensive gifts in shopping malls resounding with irritating music, and while I sigh with relief when the decorations are finally taken down and the last desiccated Christmas-tree needles are hoovered up, I do not agree with Ebeneezer Scrooge that “Every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.” I love Christmas with the same awe and wholehearted sense of ritual participation that I have felt since childhood.
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by Keith Taylor
When my daughter called from college to talk about coming home for Thanksgiving, she mentioned in passing that she’d just seen something she thought I might enjoy at the library—a display of first edition poetry books, including a first edition of Paradise Lost. Now I readily admit that Milton has been one of my blind spots, one of the few pieces of canonical literature I haven’t warmed to, although I keep trying and I think I’m getting closer. Still I thought I might like to see this book.
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by Ashley David
Some years back, in the fall-out from the dot.com bubble-burst and the death of my grandmother, I sold my suits in a yard sale and took off for Mexico, where I spent six months immersing myself in a broader spectrum of reality than is customary in the U.S. and immersing myself in places where this reality is a given. My days and nights were populated by both the living and the dead, and nobody thought that was weird. I spent a night, for example, in a hacienda that was so haunted from the days of the Mexican Revolution that eight of us, all adults, climbed into the same (big) bed for the night. Given that a man, hanged during the Revolution, was still dangling from the rafters in the corner, we hoped to rest easier together. None of us could see him, but we didn’t doubt that he was among us. The man’s presence was legend and had been confirmed by a friend’s five year old on a prior visit. The child had asked his mother, without a note of fear in his voice, “Mommy, why is the man in purple swinging in the corner?”
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