Skip to Content

Willow Heath

Will predominantly writes about the books of Books and Bao, examining the literature of a place and how the authors have used the art of storytelling to reflect the world and the culture around them.

When we enter university at the age of eighteen, most of us fall into one of a few categories: some of us know what job we want and how to get it, and study accordingly; many of us follow a passion and see where it takes us, hoping for the best; and an unfortunate amount …

Read More about Why You Should Teach English as a Foreign Language (TEFL)

The feeling of restlessness comes hand-in-hand with the sorrow of parting ways with a place or a person. In All My Goodbyes, Mariana Dimópulos distils these feelings and all their ravaging effects on us into 130 gripping pages. In a single afternoon reading All My Goodbyes, readers will pass through a handful of different countries …

Read More about All My Goodbyes by Mariana Dimópulos BOOK REVIEW

In this moving collection of essays on living with schizophrenia, Esmé Weijun Wang looks back at her own life; examines the cultural zeitgeist surrounding mental health, and explores the science and stories surrounding schizophrenia in the 21st century. Mental health has become less and less of a stigma in the West over the past several …

Read More about The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang BOOK REVIEW

Teamwork can be a challenge. Even those who revel in it and find the most satisfaction in it can fail, come to blows, and end up walking away. This is true in sports, construction, design, even writing. When it works, however, it’s gratifying and makes the journey more fluid and less frightening. In travel, many …

Read More about Travelling as Partners: How to Be Stronger Together

Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell  There are many ways to approach creating a book of short stories: you can focus on a theme and explore it from different angles, you can write about a single location – a city or a country, or you can simply write what comes to mind. Wait for …

Read More about Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin BOOK REVIEW

There is a wave that is steadily gaining momentum in the world today, and that wave is being ridden by a steadily increasing number of young authors – Chloe Aridjis, with her novel Sea Monsters, is one of them. That wave is one of millennial existentialism. As children, we grew up witnessing our parents’ mid-life …

Read More about Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis BOOK REVIEW

Reading Li’s 2017 ‘anti-memoir’ Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life was not dissimilar to the imagined feeling of discovering a higher version of the English language. This sounds ridiculous, I know, but Yiyun Li has an unearthly knack for taking 26 letters and arranging them in such a way …

Read More about Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li BOOK REVIEW

Jennifer Croft is the recipient of Cullman, Fulbright, PEN, MacDowell, and NEA grants and fellowships, as well as the inaugural Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation, the 2018 Found in Translation Award, and the 2018 Man Booker International Prize (for her astonishing translation of Flights by Olga Tokarczuk). She also received the Tin House Scholarship for …

Read More about Meet the Translator: Jennifer Croft (Polish to English)

China is the oldest nation on Earth that has never been truly conquered or had its culture destroyed. It offers more to learn than any other country you could ever visit. It is also an increasingly popular tourist destination and place to live as an immigrant (or expat if you prefer). Before you visit any …

Read More about 5 Books to Read Before You Visit China

Bear with me as I begin this review with an anecdote: As I dug deep into the opening chapters of the book, and the family gathered around for dinner – each with her or his own wonderful eccentricities – I felt a burning nostalgia for when I read Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard at university. In …

Read More about To Keep the Sun Alive by Rabeah Ghaffari BOOK REVIEW