New York. Random House. 2024. 352 pages.Crafting three narrative voices and rendering each specific and compelling is just one of the literary feats that Ayelet Tsabari (b. 1973)…
FICTION
Syracuse, New York. Syracuse University Press. 2024. 222 pages.Heraclitus spoke of a constant change in both perceived and perceiver that is morally neutral, but perhaps the first of…
New York. Knopf. 2024. 291 pages.Peter Heller’s Burn follows Jess and Storey, longtime friends and outdoorsmen who emerge, like Rip Van Winkle, from an annua…
London. Hogarth. 2025. 320 pages.In Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me, nothing is what it seems. In fact, all the formulaic aspects of detective fiction are called into…
Nanjing. Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House. 2024. 251 pages.In I Am as Timid as a Mouse, Yu Hua launches a spiritual revol…
Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2025. 136 pages.The phrase “primal scream” feels bandied about these days. The Seers, Sulaiman Addonia’s third novel, is certainly primal, an…
New York. New Press. 2025. 160 pages.It may come as a surprise that Jews still live in Poland. At the start of World War II, Poland was a center of Jewish culture and home to 3.3 mill…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2024. 381 pages.Quite naturally, one wants to connect Powers’s title to the act of making a novel, with the emphasis on playfulness. But this is no fun house,…
New York. Pantheon. 2025. 336 pages.In Laila Lalami’s new fiction, The Dream Hotel, an ordinary journey home turns into a nightmare. Sara Hussein, a Moroccan American scienti…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2025. 282 pages.The Malaysian London-based author Tash Aw has won consistent critical acclaim since the publication of his first novel, The Ha…
Handforth, UK. Honford Star. 2025. 208 pages.Bora Chung made her anglophone debut in 2019 with a story in Samovar magazine about a head popping out of a toilet who c…
Evanston, Illinois. Curbstone Books. 2024. 256 pages.Bunkong Tuon’s debut novel tells the coming-of-age story of a Cambodian American writer, Samnang Sok, written in the first person.…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2025. 272 pages.In The Dissenters, the first of Youssef Rakha’s (b. 1976) novels written in English, the story begins with…
McAllen, Texas. FlowerSong Press. 2024. 294 pages.From its title, Putinoika, the fourth novel by Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi, delivers some of the most urgent literature imaginable.…
Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2024. 291 pages.Kevin Lambert’s celebrated novel May Our Joy Endure is a “chant” that crescendos as the writer explores the widening chasm betwe…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2024. 144 pages.Feelings can never be fully transmitted through language, but stories try. With great attention to how words work with and against one…
New York. Archipelago. 2024. 211 pages.Tomás González (b. 1950, Medellín) may not come immediately to mind if one is asked to name the best contemporary fiction writers from Colombia.…
Montreal. Mémoire d’encrier. 2024. 303 pages.With time, the greatest of bards, alone able to unveil how this text—literally without a full stop—will conclude, Je remercie la nuit…
Oakville, Ontario. Mosaic Press. 2024. 158 pages.The landscape of Forgotten Exiles is diversely and richly populated: whether set in the Caribbean, South Ame…
Berkeley, California. Stone Bridge Press. 2025. 208 pages.In the thirty-four stories in A Hundred Years and a Day, Tomoka Shibasaki paints a piecemeal portrait of her Japanes…
Paris. Gallimard. 2024. 416 pages.The new novel by the author of Meursault, contre-enquête (2014; see WLT, March 2015, 56) and Zabor ou les psaumes (2017; see WLT,…
New York. Oxford University Press. 2024. 230 pages.In 2004 Oxford University Press published Paris Tales, edited and translated by Helen Constantine, a distinguished…
New York. Europa Editions. 2025. 208 pages.Quick. Make an immediate armchair reservation for Robert Seethaler’s joyful celebration in The Café with No Name, translat…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2024. 276 pages.In Little Rot, Akwaeke Emezi continues their investigation into often-overlooked communities by focusing on the un…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter Books. 2025. 256 pages.Can Xue is a prolific writer of stories, publishing several hundred over the past forty years. Her work is reminiscent of Kafka…