New York. Pantheon Books. 2024. 308 pages.
Iranian American authors are often called upon to represent their culture and people against a steady stream of unpleasant news headlines ab…
FICTION
Trans. Oonagh Stransky. New York. Europa. 2024. 144 pages. Lifelong repercussions of an obsessive, unrequited love mingle with lyrical ruminations on death, language, and literature i…
London. Bloomsbury. 2023. 288 pages. Indian novelist Anjum Hasan dexterously weaves together the history of communal fault lines in History’s Angel, her evocative new novel. The title…
London. Pushkin Press. 2024. 272 pages. So many writers have presented Red Riding Hood’s journey through the woods as an analogy for female adolescence that the forest has become an e…
Shanghai. Shanghai Sanlian Culture Publishing House. 2024. 308 pages. Shuang Xuetao, who was born in 1983 and raised in northern China, began his writing career in his late twenties.…
Seattle. Cune Press. 2024. 198 pages. With a sharp eye for detail, Gretchen McCullough’s Shahrazad’s Gift is a short-story collection that delves into Cairo’s lively, chaotic daily in…
St. Paul, Minnesota. River Boat Books. 2023. 409 pages. There has been an astonishing resurgence of Nazis in recent years, in the books we read, in the films we watch, even in our pol…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2024. 213 pages. Vienna is at the intersection of at least two important, but also rather niche, cultural regions: the onetime administrative cent…
Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dzanc Books. 2023. 216 pages. Farah Ali’s debut novel, The River, the Town, chronicles the journey of Baadal and his family amidst economic and environmental stri…
Portland. Tin House. 2024. 336 pages. The stories we hear as children can remain with us for our entire lives. They can be memories passed down from one generation to the next, fables…
Toronto. Doubleday Canada. 2023. 336 pages. In Everything There Is, M. G. Vassanji, a multiple-award-winning Canadian author of African Asian heritage, shifts his attention back to So…
Singapore. Penguin Random House SEA. 2023. 235 pages. Banned in Vietnam in 2017 and translated into English in 2023, The Termite Queen exposes the crossroads of the Vietnamese communi…
Pasadena, California. 7.13 Books. 2023. 276 pages. Bangladeshi literature student Beena is frozen in front of the television: it’s 2003 and her adopted country, the US, is again bombi…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2024. 256 pages. Parasol Against the Axe is Helen Oyeyemi’s love letter to Prague, a city where she has lived for the past ten years. Her literary career—in…
New York. Viking. 2024. 470 pages. One appreciates a chronological narrative line, founded in characters and social context, gathering momentum as characters interact, discovering and…
New York. Europa Editions. 2024. 176 pages. During the early-morning hours dominated by night-shift workers and by the eccentric and romantic few whose internal clocks simply skew noc…
London. Pushkin Press. 2023. 128 pages. When Natsuko Imamura (b. 1980) initially published the novella This Is Amiko, Do You Copy? under the title “The New Daughter” in 2010, it won t…
New York. Pantheon. 2024. 288 pages. Yoko Ogawa’s magnificently wrought novels have won her every Japanese literary award. Many of these novels are about remembering a distant past wh…
New York. Bloomsbury. 2023. 320 pages. Tan Twan Eng’s third work of historical fiction gathers a cast of characters in 1920s Malaya: there is Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert; Wi…
New York. New Vessel. 2023. 147 pages. Stênio Gardel’s widely acclaimed debut novel, in Bruna Dantas Lobato’s brilliant translation, won the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Li…
New York. Catapult. 2023. 240 pages. This autobiographical Russian novel received the NOS Prize in 2021. The wounds referred to in the title are several—her mother’s breast removed f…
New York. Random House. 2023. 256 pages. Tremor is the first novel in twelve years by Nigerian American author Teju Cole, following the widespread acclaim of Open City (2011; see WLT,…
New York. Columbia University Press. 2023. 289 pages. The risk of misunderstanding looms in Puppet Flower: A Novel of 1867 Formosa, Yao-Chang Chen’s second historical novel of five an…
New York. Open Letter. 2023. 173 pages. From acclaimed Spanish writer Sara Mesa, Un Amor is a slim, provocative novel about love—adoring and reverential, tempestuous and pernicious. W…
Edinburgh. Charco Press. 2024. 202 pages. Looking at the contents page of The Dark Side of Skin for the first time, I was drawn to the title of the book’s third section, “Back to St P…