06/14/2021
In this hypnotic memoir, Burmese-American novelist Myint (The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven) looks to myth and folklore to explore her family’s legacy. Ghosts, reincarnated relatives, dark omens, and imagined scenes populate a timeline that oscillates between the author’s forbears’ past and present day, stretching from Myanmar, where she was born in 1989, to Thailand, California, Spain, and Colorado. In lyrical prose, Myint straddles dream and reality beginning with a mythic take on her great-grandfather, who “died a man but was reborn as me.” Lived experience is overlaid with speculative history, as Myint, who moved to the U.S. as a child, mines the alienation—sowed by the colonialism and racism endured by generations of her family—that has rendered her “a ghost” throughout her life. To fill the void of loneliness surrounding her, she pieces together her family’s past, from her mother’s “cursed” home in Yangon and her parents’ marriage on a lake that was “constructed by the British” to her older brother’s illness and death (“I also believed he had drowned in the lake”). While her poetic narration is indisputably alluring, the nonlinear story line can sometimes become taxing. For those willing to put in the work, this serpentine narrative is a thing of beauty. (Aug.)
[A] hypnotic memoir. . . . In lyrical prose, Myint straddles dream and reality. . . . Her poetic narration is indisputably alluring. . . . This serpentine narrative is a thing of beauty.”—Publishers Weekly
“Composed in compressed, laser-sharp interrogations of immigration and prejudice, colonialism and inheritance, Names for Light reads like poetry. . . . In its power, intensity, and visual presentation, Names for Light evokes recent works of Claudia Rankine.”—NPR.org
"Names For Light is itself the "place" where the family’s past – and Myint’s dynamically evolving present — approach each other. The tug and pull of these forces, and the broader awareness of tyranny in the world, comprise an environment for the reader that is both demanding in its multiple vectors and gratifying in its patterning and acute intelligence.”—On The Seawall
“Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is driving an important autobiographical rickshaw into the twenty-first century.”—Vi Khi Nao
“Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is one of the most remarkable writers of our time, and Names for Light is a piercing and heartbreaking revelation.”—Janice Lee, author of Damnation and The Sky Isn't Blue
“Myint’s geographies and her syntax will echo inside you like luminous ghosts: opulent and ruthless and profound, like drowned sapphires waiting to be reunited with the wind.”—Lily Hoang
03/01/2021
Dragged down by cancer, kidney failure, and recurring pneumonia, Pulitzer Prize winner Bragg had his heart lifted by The Speckled Beauty—a rambunctious stray dog who also needed love. In Seeing Ghosts, a study of grief and family, journalist Chow opens with emigration from China and Hong Kong to Cuba and America and moves to her mother's death from cancer (75,000-copy first printing). From award-winning news producer and photojournalist Copaken, author of the New York Times best-selling Shutterbabe, Ladyparts contextualizes soured marriage, solo parenting, and dating while ill with the substandard treatment of women by U.S. health care. In I Left My Homework in the Hamptons, Grossberg reveals exactly what it's like to tutor the children of New York's wealthiest families (50,000-copy first printing). Author of the New York Times best-booked Ten Thousand Saints, Henderson explores a long-term marriage that has survived her husband's struggles with physical and mental illness in Everything I Have Is Yours (75,000-copy first printing). Ranging from 38 Grand Slam titles to embracing her sexual identity at age 51, King details a life lived spectacularly in All In. In Honor Bound, McGrath recounts serving as the first woman to fly a combat mission for the Marine Corps and efforts to unseat Mitch McConnell as Kentucky senator. Winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, Yangon, Myanmar-born, Bangkok- and San José-raised Myint's Names for Light probes silence, absence, and death over three generations of her family, defined by postcolonial struggle. In Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be, a Roxane Gay Audacious Bookclub November Pick, Perkins plumbs racism, wealth, poverty, beauty, and more from the perspective of a Southern Black woman. Qu's Made in China captures the challenges of an immigrant childhood, which included a mother so brutally demanding that Qu finally complained to New York's Office of Children and Family Services. In This Will All Be Over Soon, Saturday Night Live cast member Strong addresses grief over a close cousin's death from glioblastoma in the midst of the pandemic (75,000-copy first printing)..
★ 2021-06-16
A writer born in Myanmar and raised in Thailand and the U.S. traces how her family history has haunted her personal journey.
In this uniquely structured memoir—sleek, poetic paragraphs surrounded by plenty of white space on each page—Myint introduces herself as the reincarnation of her great-grandfather, a relative of the royal family in Myanmar, where the author was born. She lived in Bangkok from the ages of 1 to 7, after which she and her family immigrated to California. Myint later lived in Colorado, Rhode Island, and Spain, but no matter where she traveled, she was never able to escape her ancestral history. Some of this is a matter of reincarnation: “When my great-grandmother finally died, she was reborn as my middle sister. My sister was my wife in our past life. My mother says I followed her into this life.” But some of it, Myint writes, has been a product of dissociation associated with inherited trauma. Many of her personal memories, she notes, came to her in the third person, meaning that she pictured herself as a character in the scene rather than an inhabitant of her body. Due to this disconnection, Myint tells her own story in the third person while narrating her family history—much of which she did not personally witness—in the first person. Additionally, she tells her ancestors’ story from past to present, but her own from present to past. Braiding these opposing timelines and narrative perspectives creates an innovative structure that effectively contrasts the author’s deep enmeshment with her family history with her distance from reality. On a line-by-line level, the book is spectacularly lyrical, and each word feels perfectly chosen. Some readers may struggle with the chronology and unnamed characters, but the text is undeniably powerful.
An imaginative and compelling memoir about what we inherit and what we pass on.
