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.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster
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