Jane Ciabattari

1 month ago | lithub.com | Jane Ciabattari

Jemimah Wei’s mesmerizing, emotionally engaging first novel, The Original Daughter, which is set in Singapore in the years between 1995 and 2015, arrives this week after a journey of more than a decade. She was born and raised in Singapore, where she launched a blog in 2007, worked in advertising and was a social media influencer. She started the novel in 2014. Five years later she came to the US as an MFA graduate student at Columbia.

2 months ago | lithub.com | Jane Ciabattari

Guadalupe Nettel and I first met in Berkeley at the 2017 Bay Area Book Festival, where she appeared on a panel I moderated honoring the centennial of the birth of Juan Rulfo, the Mexican writer who is considered the father of magical realism. He had a transformative influence on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who compared him to Sophocles, and ushered in the Latin American boom.

2 months ago | lithub.com | Jane Ciabattari |Lydia Millet

Read Lydia Millet’s fiction from her first novel, Omnivores(1996) to her new short story collection, Atavists, and you’ll trace an evolutionary arc of American culture from the Home Shopping Network to AI and LARP. There are consistencies through the years—climate change, bodybuilding, birds, dinosaurs, disjointed relationships, for instance—but her work never feels repetitive. Instead it feels inventive, as she keeps pushing further into her universe.

2 months ago | lithub.com | Jane Ciabattari |Kate Folk

A first novel with a combination of heavyweight ambition, wry wit, and pathos, peppered with hilarious moments, Kate Folk’s Sky Daddy draws inspiration from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Her epigram is a fitting lead-up to the novel:Article continues after advertisement“All men live enveloped in whale-lines. –Herman Melville, Moby-DickPlanes are the whales of the sky.

Mar 12, 2025 | lithub.com | Jane Ciabattari

Karen Russell’s first novel, Swamplandia!, set in swampland Florida, is a haunting, alluring phantasmagoria, filled with vivid wordplay and imaginative energy. Her equally surreal second novel, The Antidote, offers an even more spacious vision. She traces a group of townspeople living in a tiny Nebraska town over the months that begin with the monstrous 1935 dust storm that came to be known as Black Sunday and ends with another historic disaster, the flood of the Republican River.