Dr. Siri Paiboun is having a tough time. At seventy-two, he just wants to retire; his boss is a jerk, and his job as the only coroner in Laos after the Communist takeover has him dealing with a constant lack of supplies, bureaucrats who try to convince him that every death is from natural causes, and the recalcitrant spirits of the bodies he autopsies.

A force to be reckoned with, Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is an odd combination of The House on Mango Street, science-fiction fandom and bad karma.
Based entirely on the idea of bad karma, or in the story’s case ‘fukú,’ we follow the life of Oscar Cabral and his family who have had the unfortunate curse of fukú placed on them.

As a welcome to Jezebel.com there is a wonderful heading: “Celebrity, Sex, Fashion. Without Airbrushing.” This sounds like my kind of web page. One of Jezebel’s main features rates gossip magazines based on their content. Each magazine is assigned a grade and a pithy caption; the same system is applied to their weekly feature, “Fine Lines.

The subtitle of Identitytheory.com says it all: “a literary website, sort of.” Poking around the website, the first things you see are creepy-cool photos and intriguing article headings, such as “What You’re Talking About is Pure: An Interview with Idaho.

Reader, I vomited.

Not in actuality, but while reading Laura Joh Rowland’s novel The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte, I came pretty close. The premise of Rowland’s novel is that Charlotte Bronte didn’t spend most of her life living at home with her father, eccentric sisters, and drunk brother before getting married (then dying two months later.

In vain I have struggled; it will not do. You must allow me to express how ardently I love and admire Colin Firth’s portrayal of the quintessential hot English gentleman, Fitzwilliam Darcy.
It is way too easy for moviemakers to miss the boat in adaptations of Jane Austen.

At the risk of sounding like the kind of English major who starts sentences by saying, “The really great thing about Shakespeare is ____,” let me tell you the really great thing about Shakespeare.

I, along with many moviegoers, am frequently disgruntled when the screen adaptations of a favorite book are not true to the plot. “That never happened in the book!” I cry out, scrutinizing the characters to see if they measure up to their literary counterparts.

If you had six words to sum up your life, what would they be? Perhaps you’ve never considered penning down your adventures or even misadventures, but everyone’s got a story to tell. And now you don’t even need a biographer to get it out there.

Not Quite What I Was Planning is a book of six-word memoirs, edited by SMITH Magazine.

Jennifer Finney Boylan’s first memoir, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders chronicled her transition from James to Jennifer and became a surprise bestseller in the process. Several appearances on Oprah and a stint on All My Children later, Boylan is back with her lyrical follow-up, I’m Looking Through You-Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir.