Atlantic County Library System

In which we consult the Book Review’s past to shed light on the books of the present. This week: Amy Tan’s debut, “The Joy Luck Club.”

“Of all the books I have reread to comfort myself, I have turned most often to ‘Sleepless Nights,’ not without a little bitter tang of irony because of its title.”

Two debut novels, “Number One Chinese Restaurant,” by Lillian Li, and “The Emperor of Shoes,” by Spencer Wise, feature characters whose lives are deeply entangled with two cultures.

The humor writer Simon Rich, whose latest collection is “Hits and Misses,” would love to see his life as a Ken Burns documentary: “Just a lot of slow pans of me typing on my computer, while sitting in different positions. And the whole time, inexplicably, there’s jazz.”