And now we’re in the month of September. Hello, September. From our space, it seems like the summer is beginning to abate somewhat — or at least it’s moved out of the “brutally hot and humid” camp. So if you’re looking for books to bridge the gap between summer reads and something cozier, here are a couple of suggestions.
Auntland
by K-Ming Chang
I had an aunt who went to the dentist and asked to get her tongue pulled. We only do teeth, the dentist said, but did it anyway. She took her tongue home in a jar and flushed it down the toilet and years later a fisherman in Half Moon Bay made the evening news, waving my aunt’s tongue like a flag at the end of his pole. The police are still looking for the body it belonged to. I had an aunt who worked at a Chinese buffet and stole us a live crab, which my other aunt boiled alive, and when I tried to crack the legs with my teeth the way they did, one of my molars fractured into five and my other aunt, not that other aunt but this other other aunt, spent the rest of the night tweezing tooth-shrapnel out of my gums.