“Hotel Iris is a striking achievement.  Ogawa’s evocative, minimalist prose carries the story along at a luxurious pace and adds a quiet beauty to unsettling scenes. Dark and seductive, this book will stay with you long after the first page.”—Bust magazine

“Ambitious . . . In a daring literary performance, Syjuco weaves the invented with the factual . . . Ilustrado is being presented as a tracing of 150 years of Philippine history, but it’s considerably more than that . . . Spiced with surprises and leavened with uproariously funny moments, it is punctuated with serious philosophical musings.” —Raymond Bonner, The New York Times Book Review

"The Street of a Thousand Blossoms has epic ambitions—considerable scope, encompassing the years 1939-66; a multitude of significant characters; and recurring moments of tragedy and redemption. But it's written in the reassuringly small-scale style of a folk tale, characterized by short anecdotes and a heavy dose of morals . . . Tsukiyama's prose is simple and slow, at times seeming to strive for the kind of eloquence found in a Noh play, whose centuries-old art depends on stylized action to create tension and drama."—Louisa Thomas, The New York Times

"Darkly exhilarating . . . Winton, one of Australia's most acclaimed novelists, excels at conveying the shadowy side of his country's beauty, the way even the most ordinary landscape can exert a paralyzing hold . . . Winton's novel succeeds as a tautly gorgeous meditation on the inescapable human addiction to 'the monotony of drawing breath,' whether you want to or not."—Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times

"Ghosh's best and most ambitious work yet is an adventure story set in nineteenth-century Calcutta against the backdrop of the Opium Wars. On the Ibis, a ship engaged in transporting opium across the Bay of Bengal, varied life stories converge. A fallen raja, a half-Chinese convict, a plucky American sailor, a widowed opium farmer, a transgendered religious visionary are all united by the 'smoky paradise' of the opium seed. Ghosh writes with impeccable control, and with a vivid and sometimes surprising imagination: a woman's tooth protrudes 'like a tilted gravestone'; an opium addict's writhing spasms are akin to 'looking at a pack of rats squirming in a sack'; the body of a young man is 'a smoking crater that had just risen from the ocean and was still waiting to be explored.'"—The New Yorker

"Fans of the absurdity and dark humor of Milan Kundera's portraits of life behind the Iron Curtain will appreciate these same elements in Ma Jian's work."—Alane Salierno Mason, The Baltimore Sun

"As a whole [these stories] create an imaginative and disturbing vision of life at its most oppressive."—Rodney Welch, Freetimes

"Ma Jian has accomplished something extremely difficult. That is, he has created a work of art that functions simultaneously as literature and call to action . . . You wish that copies of this book could be distributed along the route of the Olympic torch's progress toward the upcoming Beijing games, an event that might not be taking place had the world not succumbed to the seductions of forgetfulness—the same dangers and temptations that Ma Jian's hero, and his novel, struggle so valiantly to resist."—Fracine Prose, The New York Review of Books