The Best New Books This Week Dance Between Genres

"OK, I'll admit: I'm being a bit facetious here. All six of the following notable releases do deserve your attention for one reason or another - many, precisely for their spry dance with the expectations established by the genres they invoke. But I do ask that, when you pull one of them down and crack it open, you at least spare a thought for the poor, polite label that has been left behind, flaunted and dejected, on the bookshelf where it had stood."

"Jin Xuefei had been in the U.S. for what was to be a temporary stay, pursuing graduate studies after his time in the Chinese army, when tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square in 1989. He never returned to China; he began writing in English as Ha Jin, condemned Chinese censorship and claimed several of America's highest regarded literary prizes. But the violent suppression of student protests at Tiananmen - his "turning point," he told NPR in 2014 - continues to haunt him in his effective exile."

"Don't call Jen's new book a memoir, exactly. This gimlet-eyed account of a difficult mother-daughter relationship makes up too much stuff to qualify; but then, to call the book a novel feels misleading too. The book is a candid portrait of her relationship with her mother, Agnes, even if it steers more toward emotional truth than factual accuracy. We can leave these questions for the philosophers, or whoever decides the genre tags on Amazon. (Same difference?)"

Six recent book releases subvert and play with established genre expectations, inviting readers to rethink tidy labels. One novel centers on a Chinese graduate student in the United States who researches the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and wrestles with exile and the duty of memory. Another work blends memoir and fiction to portray a fraught mother-daughter relationship that privileges emotional truth over factual accuracy. These books use candid, big-hearted voices to confront political trauma, identity, and familial complexity. The collection foregrounds narrative experimentation and the porous boundary between fact and invention, emphasizing urgency and personal reckoning.

Read at Kqed