Leland Cheuk

After COVID-19 hit last year, San Francisco author and journalist Chris Colin and his wife upgraded their internet connection to fiber to accommodate their family’s increased reliance on the digital world. Ironically, Colin had also just completed a humor book that imagines what would happen if the internet went out forever.

“Off: The Day the Internet Died,” written by Colin and illustrated by Brooklyn-based visual artist Rinee Shah, is a funny picture book about a serious topic: What have we lost from our pervasive and likely permanent reliance on the web?

Read the rest of the interview at the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Few literary heroes are more ubiquitous and enduring to multiple generations of Asians around the world than Monkey of the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West, by Wu Cheng’en.

Considered one of the Four Classic Novels of Chinese literature, the sprawling, picaresque fable has been adapted into countless films, TV shows, stage plays and children’s books in Asia. Monkey King: Journey to the West, a new translation from Penguin Classics, serves as a solid primer for Western neophytes.”

Read the rest of the review at the San Francisco Chronicle.

“One of the epigraphs in Simon Han’s debut novel Nights When Nothing Happened is a line from “Epistle,” a Li-Young Lee poem: “Before it all gets wiped away, let me say, there is wisdom in the slender hour which arrives between two shadows.” Nights When Nothing Happened is very much about the private, shadowy parts of ordinary lives, but Han’s evocative writing is anything but ordinary.”

Read the rest over at NPR.