The 19th century was a great century for writers. If I could only bring one century of writing with me to a desert island, I would choose the nineteenth without hesitation. Not only for the literature but for the essays: the essayists of the 19th century were wide-ranging in…
The Samurai’s Garden by Gail Tsukiyama is a quietly compelling novel. It tells of the passage of a boy out of childhood: the year is 1937 and Stephen is a Chinese boy sent to recuperate in his family’s Japanese beach house following a withering bout of tuberculosis…
The Professor and the Housekeeper by Yoko Ogawa has a beautiful rhythm to it, easy-going, fluid, and peaceful. The characters are well-defined and the situation they are in is compelling. But the three devices Ogawa employs to keep her plot going, the beauty…
Yesterday I read Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, her first novel and the beginning of her explorations through fiction into the strange relationship between England and the Caribbean Islands it governed for years. England transplanted its culture and systems of education…
Yesterday I read Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart after going to see the movie over the weekend. I really enjoyed the movie and loved its book-loving characters and of course I loved the underlying message of the power of the written word. Great good comes from reading great…
Yesterday I read Female Trouble, the wonderful collection of short stories by Antonya Nelson. Reading Nelson’s short stories is like reading a journal, a really well-written one that is guaranteed private and has been opened just this one time, for the…
Selim Nassib’s The Palestinian Lover presents the possibility of an impossible relationship: a love affair between Gold Meir and a Lebano-Palestinian banker, Albert Pharaon. Golda is in her thirties, committed to the Jewish State, Eretz Israel, and Albert is older and sanguine, and…
Yesterday I read My House in Umbria by William Trevor, an author I have liked for a very long time. Like his short stories, My House in Umbria is underscored by a theme of survival over which his very real characters play out…
These were the top 10 stories published by Nina Sankovitch in 2009. You can also dive into monthly archives for 2009 by using the calendar at the top of this page.