DREAMLAND
By Kevin Baker, HarperTorch
Set in lower Manhattan and Coney Island circa 1910, this wild novel is a stew of real-life and fictional gangsters, Tammany pols, labor reformers and carnival performers, all deployed in a sprawling plot that begins with the ill-advised rescue of a midget by a gangster named Kid Twist. Dreamland is historical fiction at its most entertaining," Thomas Mallon said in The New York Times Book Review in 1999.
WHO'S IRISH?
Stories By Gish Jen
Vintage Contemporaries
The helter-skelter of the American immigrant experience is the subject of these tales, most of which revolve around cross-cultural skirmishes between an older generation of Chinese and their more assimilated children. "Jen's gift is for comedy that resonates, and sadnesses that arise with perfect timing from absurdities," Jean Thompson wrote in 1999.
AN ACTOR AND HIS TIME
By John Gielgud with
John Miller and John Powell Applause
In his modest memoir, the British actor, who died last month at 96, reveals his passion for the theatrical life while offering breezy portraits of T.S. Eliot, Edith Evans, Marlon Brando and others in his varied and eccentric supporting cast. "He recounts his past with the same urbanity and sensitivity that have characterized his art," Frank Rich wrote in 1980.
BREATH AND SHADOWS
By Ella Leffland
At the core of this melancholic novel about three generations of a well-to-do Danish clan is the question of what we lose in a lifetime, and what we leave behind to prove we existed. The result is "an exquisite and moving family saga," Brooks Hansen wrote last year.
THE LUSTRE OF OUR COUNTRY:
The American Experience of Religious Freedom By John T. Noonan Jr. University of California
A federal judge chronicles America's pursuit of religious freedom and the difficulties of reconciling faith and politics. In 1998 the reviewer Richard Wightman Fox called this a "very enlightening tour through a complex legal and religious history."
TRUTH COMES IN BLOWS:
A Memoir
By Ted Solotaroff, W.W. Norton
An editor and critic recalls his difficult childhood in prewar New Jersey and his struggle to understand his brutish father, the emperor of a plate-glass business and a malignant force in the lives of his family. "For all its pain and sadness,
FATHERS, SONS,
AND BROTHERS:
The Men in My Family
by Bret Lott Washington
Square/Pocket Books
A collection of autobiographical essays exploring the complex emotions of being a son, sibling and father. "Lott observes and beautifully renders those small moments that can change a life," Andrea Cooper said in 1997. "He captures the rough-and-tumble of men growing up."
ANNALS OF THE FORMER WORLD
By John McPhee
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
This Pulitzer Prize-winning opus about North America's rockscape pulls together the author's four previous books on geological history (focusing on the continent's dramatic eastern and western extremes) and a new essay on the Midwest. The result is an orderly march through deep time, exposing a lode of science and digressions. In 1998 the reviewer David Quammen found McPhee an overly cautious tour guide, but said, "There are gemlike sentences, richly rhythmic paragraphs, nicely burnished synecdoches, metaphors as pungent as wasabi and, behind those felicities, vast amounts of painstaking research."
IMANI ALL MINE
By Connie Porter
Mariner/Houghton Mifflin
Tasha is an unwed teen-age mother in a Buffalo, New York, ghetto where her promise is frustrated by daunting obstacles, including her neglectful parents and teachers and her own poor self-image. Last year the reviewer Andrea Higbie called this a "beautifully realized novel."
ALL-BRIGHT COURT
By Connie Porter
Mariner/Houghton Mifflin
Traces two decades of life in a community of black steelworkers who migrated to upstate New York from the rural South in the 1960s. "Porter conveys the truth of her characters' lives," Anne Whitehouse wrote in 1991.
FLEUR DE LEIGH'S LIFE OF CRIME
By Diane Leslie. Scribner
The 10-year-old heroine of this first novel, failing to gain the attention of her glamorous show-biz parents in 1950s Hollywood, turns for love to a procession of oddball nannies. The result is "a delicious and disturbing" coming-of-age story, Nina Sonenberg wrote in 1999.
WRITING NEW YORK:
A Literary Anthology
Edited by Phillip Lopate Washington Square/Pocket Books
This hymn to New York City marshals more than 100 voices spanning two centuries, from Washington Irving to Tom Wolfe, Edgar Allan Poe to Dawn Powell. Lopate's "excellent anthology" includes "writers who love crowds and writers who hang out alone and brood," Garrison Keillor wrote in 1998.
June 9 to June 15 A photo of two men riding trendy high-wheel Penny-Farthing bicycles past a Qing Dynasty gate aptly captures the essence of Taipei in 1897 — a newly colonized city on the cusp of great change. The Japanese began making significant modifications to the cityscape in 1899, tearing down Qing-era structures, widening boulevards and installing Western-style infrastructure and buildings. The photographer, Minosuke Imamura, only spent a year in Taiwan as a cartographer for the governor-general’s office, but he left behind a treasure trove of 130 images showing life at the onset of Japanese rule, spanning July 1897 to
One of the most important gripes that Taiwanese have about the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is that it has failed to deliver concretely on higher wages, housing prices and other bread-and-butter issues. The parallel complaint is that the DPP cares only about glamor issues, such as removing markers of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) colonialism by renaming them, or what the KMT codes as “de-Sinification.” Once again, as a critical election looms, the DPP is presenting evidence for that charge. The KMT was quick to jump on the recent proposal of the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) to rename roads that symbolize
On the evening of June 1, Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) apologized and resigned in disgrace. His crime was instructing his driver to use a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon. The Control Yuan is the government branch that investigates, audits and impeaches government officials for, among other things, misuse of government funds, so his misuse of a government vehicle was highly inappropriate. If this story were told to anyone living in the golden era of swaggering gangsters, flashy nouveau riche businessmen, and corrupt “black gold” politics of the 1980s and 1990s, they would have laughed.
It was just before 6am on a sunny November morning and I could hardly contain my excitement as I arrived at the wharf where I would catch the boat to one of Penghu’s most difficult-to-access islands, a trip that had been on my list for nearly a decade. Little did I know, my dream would soon be crushed. Unsure about which boat was heading to Huayu (花嶼), I found someone who appeared to be a local and asked if this was the right place to wait. “Oh, the boat to Huayu’s been canceled today,” she told me. I couldn’t believe my ears. Surely,
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