Open Letter

Ben-Naftali's The Teacher takes us through a keenly crafted, fictional biography for Elsa--from childhood through adolescence, from the Holocaust to her personal aftermath--and brings us face to face with one woman's struggle in light of one of history's great atrocities.

With characteristic wit, careening style, and array of cultural references, high and low and everything in between-from Shakespeare, the Bronte sisters, and Vladimir Nabokov to Talking Heads, superhero movies, and Rick and Morty-the second volume of Fresan's trilogy is one of the most ambitious, unique, and entertaining novels of our time.

On the surface, Ha Seong-Nan's stories seem pleasant enough, yet there's always something disturbing just below the surface, ready to permanently disrupt the characters' lives.

Told mostly in flashbacks thirty years later, 77 is rich in descriptive detail, dream sequences, and even elements of the occult, which build into a haunting novel about absence and the clash between morality and survival when living under a dictatorship.