skopia
Bandits waylay a bride bound for a leprous distiller, and the son conceived in the sorghum grows up under Japanese occupation. Mo Yan makes rural Shandong's violence gorgeous and unbearable at once.
Ngugi's schoolmasters caned children for speaking Gikuyu, or hung a plate around their necks reading I AM STUPID. Empire takes the mind through language, he argues, and he abandoned English for his fiction.
Britain shipped 160,000 convicts to Australia between 1787 and 1868. Hughes takes you down into the floggings and the Norfolk Island cells, and out again into the nation they made there.
Five years in the high Arctic, among narwhals and muskoxen and light that behaves like nothing further south. Lopez asks what Westerners have wanted from that country, and what the wanting cost.
Gray gave up an editor's job for stone quarries in Tuscany, Catalonia, Naxos, and Apulia, cooking wild greens, snails, and game over wood fires and setting down a Mediterranean already disappearing.
Feinstein spent the 1985-86 season inside coach Bob Knight's Indiana basketball program and printed all of it, the profanity and the fury and the players absorbing both. Sports reporters still envy that access.
A mother sings the same four lines to her son at every age, and the years turn the song around. Munsch made it up after two stillborn children.