Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea may be my favorite of his novels yet. I spoke with him for Barnes and Noble Review. Here’s an excerpt. CRL: Someone asked me, “Is that the difference between a Western hero and an Eastern hero?” MN: What did you say? CRL: Maybe. I don’t know. But the Western heroes we know — in literature, it’s . . .
I wasn’t sure when exactly the announcement became official, which is the reason I held off on posting this here, but I’m excited and delighted to report that my employer, Thomson Reuters, awarded $3000 to Girls Write Now last year, as part of the company’s 2013 “Community Champion” awards, because of my volunteering there. (By day I work in TR’s . . .
The last time I stayed with my father in Miami over the holidays, I made the mistake of thinking he was lonely. I had a bad habit of trying to decode his emotional state from external markers, in this case his threadbare green bathmat. Part of a towel set my parents acquired when I was seven or so, it had . . .
On a rooftop of a prison in South Africa Nelson Mandela tends garden and has a birthday, as my Jamaican grandfather in Harlem, New York raises tomatoes and turns ninety-one. I have taken touch for granted: my grandfather’s hands, his shoulders, his pajamas which smell of vitamin pills… (Read the rest at Graywolf.)