Homeboy

Seth Morgan. Vintage Books USA, $12 (390pp) ISBN 978-0-679-73395-9

Joe Speaker, a junkie and barker at a San Francisco strip joint, finds a 69-carat blue diamond that involves him in a murder/blackmail deal and lands him in jail. ``Overall the novel and its sad look at prison life are marred by a highly derivative thriller plot, with characters . . . all tending to talk the same combination of hipster slang and B-movie cliches,'' said PW. (May)

Featured Fiction Reviews

Canisia Lubrin

Windham Campbell Prize–winning poet Lubrin (Voodoo Hypothesis) makes her fiction debut with a thrilling and inventive collection centered on Black life in the Caribbean and the Continue reading »

Michel Nieva

Argentine writer Nieva sets his ingenious and outré English-language debut, expanded from an O. Henry Prize–winning short story, in a far-future world radically altered by Continue reading »

Jack Wang

In this exemplary historical, a Chinese Canadian man fights prejudice and falls in love during WWII. Josiah Chang, who’s unable to join the army because of his race, finds work Continue reading »

Gerald Murnane

This spectacular novel from Murnane (Inland), originally published in Australia in 2009, takes the form of an internal dialogue about the images, memories, and obsessions the Continue reading »