I read The Seoul Letter Shop while I was in Korea, which made this warm story about letters, love, family and finding your way back to yourself even more fun.

Djuna’s Memoir of a Joseon Bride moves through vampires, aliens, memory transfer, monsters, zombies, and Korean history without ever feeling repetitive. Strange, inventive, and a lot of fun.

Sonoko Machida’s The Woman, the Boy, and the Whale, translated by Sam Bett, is a dark and painful story, but never a hopeless one. At its center is the idea of what can happen when someone finally finds a person willing to listen.

After a deadly virus collapses society, survival becomes dangerous and trust even more so. Choi Jin-young’s Everything Happened at Once, translated by Soje, finds hope and love in an extraordinarily brutal world.

Chen-Fu Hsu begins with a search for a snow leopard on the Tibetan Plateau and builds something much larger around it, bringing together fiction, travel writing, history, ecology, religion and the people he meets along the way.

The Formosa Exchange imagines the populations of Taiwan and Cuba suddenly switching places. Huang Chong-Kai turns that strange premise into an enormous geopolitical thought experiment about history, identity, politics and how nations understand themselves.

I knew Afong Moy was a real person. What I didn’t realize was how little of her life is actually documented. Bo Wang takes those fragments and builds a historical novel about survival, identity and who gets to tell a woman’s story.

I thought Love at Least was going to be a quick love story. Instead, Yukiko Motoya’s novella became a painful, complicated look at depression, love and what it means to live beside someone whose suffering you cannot fix.

I expected Kim Myeong-sun's poetry to feel distant after more than a century. Instead, Fruit of Life, translated by Eunice Lee, felt remarkably immediate, filled with longing, loneliness, love, grief and a voice I could hear clearly.

Funny, warm and unexpectedly sweet, How Can My Manager Be So Stupid? looks at bookstore life, workplace frustrations and how little we may actually know about the people we work beside every day.

I finished The Woman in the Purple Skirt wondering what was real. The more I thought about its point of view, the more I realized that uncertainty was exactly what kept me thinking.

I had read Sora Kim-Russell’s name many times without realizing how much of her work was already on my shelves. For Women in Translation Month, we talked about working with authors, the creative decisions behind translation, invisible care work, editing, and what translation has meant for her own writing.

A recommendation put The Specters of Algeria on my TBR. When it appeared again during Women in Translation Month, I took the hint. Hwang Yeo Jung’s novel starts small and gradually opens into something much stranger.

I went into Mothersucker expecting dark vampire horror. What surprised me was how much of the real horror came from the violence women live with, and how satisfying it was to watch someone finally make sure there were consequences.

Robin Ha’s comic cookbook looked adorable from the start, but I wasn’t expecting it to be quite this useful. After turning the review into a family affair and testing five recipes, I’m definitely not finished cooking from it.

I expected another café book built from loosely connected stories. Instead, Café. Waiting. Love. let me stay with Si-ying long enough to watch her grow up.

I first noticed Shanna Tan because of how enthusiastically she champions the books she translates. Then I looked at my shelves and realized just how many of her translations I had already read. For Women in Translation Month, I asked Shanna about working with authors, creative freedom, translator credit and the work behind the books.

A smell beneath a Seoul department store leads to something built from women's suffering, blood, and rage. Yi Seoyoung's feminist body horror is grotesque, angry, and completely shameless.

I went looking for one book sale and ended up finding 248 bookish options on Rakuten. If you’re already buying books, this is worth checking before you hit purchase.