They say the best part of any journey is the preparation. Which explains why I'm currently buried in Russian and Chinese novels, travel guides, dictionaries, and adventure memoirs. Found this gem at the library...

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Kore-Eda completely won me over with Still Walking, a gorgeous meditation on grief and how families hold space for those who are gone. He's back with family territory here, but in a much lighter register. This one follows two brothers...

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"And what you see will strengthen your love, So you may love better still what you will soon lose." Shakespeare knew. William Stoner grew up on a dirt-poor Missouri farm. His whole childhood was work, helping his parents scrape by...

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A washed-up, alcoholic writer—specializing in "witch novels"—rolls into a small, creepy dead-end town for a book signing. Problem is, nobody cares about Hal Baltimore's books. Except the sheriff, who fancies himself a writer too...

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Ten years after leaving her Ohio hometown, Prudence Bly has made it. She's at the top. In 1930s New York, a crowd of more-or-less famous artists and wannabes swarms around the fashionable young singer...

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This massive novel is the ultimate Chinese literary classic. Every Chinese person has either read it or studied it in school, and its countless episodes dominate Chinese opera. Rooted in actual historical events, transformed into legend by oral tradition...

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Rarely has a graphic novel deserved that title more than this hefty volume from Craig Thompson, which weaves text and drawing, image and narrative, into something genuinely harmonious. Multiple layers of storytelling unfold here. He tells us Dodola's story...

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On the island of Lampedusa, off the coast of Sicily, Filippo's family has always lived from the sea. His father even died there. But Filippo keeps fishing with his grandfather Ernesto. His mother Giuletta dreams of something else. She wants to sell...

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Anthony Trollope is a Victorian-era English writer, pretty obscure in France and barely translated, even though he was hugely famous and widely read in his time. In this thick novel, Trollope skewers the customs of his era through a sprawling cast...

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In 2010, as part of the France-Russia Year, fifteen French writers were invited to board the Trans-Siberian Railway—that mythic train if ever there was one—to cover the 9,288 kilometers connecting Moscow in the west to Vladivostok in the east. Among them, Dominique Fernandez...

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