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…
FICTION
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…
New York. HarperVia. 2023. 144 pages. In her first novel to be translated into English, Ia Genberg delivers a lesson on how to effectively tackle the primordial questions about human…
New York. HarperVia. 2024. 304 pages. The sufferings of the Ukrainian people are not just a matter for our evening news. Conquerors have rolled over the area from before the Scythians…
New York. Mariner Books. 2024. 400 pages. Paul Theroux’s Burma Sahib opens with a breeze-rumpled view of young Eric Blair, standing on the bow deck of the Herefordshi…
New York. Archipelago Books. 2024. 485 pages. Sixty-eight-year-old Paulina Chiziane doesn’t write for your approval but rather to protect the sanctity of her people’s memories. She do…
New York. Mulholland Books. 2024. 325 pages. A major distinction between the classic or English mysteries, most popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and the hard-boiled American or noir cr…
New York. Overlook Press. 2024. 308 pages. Katya Apekina’s Mother Doll is the strange, visceral story of Zhenia, a Russian American living in Los Angeles, whose marriage crumbles afte…
New York. Penguin Random House. 2024. 142 pages. En agosto nos vemos is Gabriel García Márquez’s long-awaited posthumous novella, published ten years after the author’s death in 2014.…
New York. Knopf. 2024. 352 pages. “My mom died for nothing. . . . My dad died anonymous after spending decades cleaning chicken shit on some corporate farm. I want my life—my death—t…
Beijing. Beijing October Literature & Art Publishing House. 2023. 320 pages. Fan Yusu’s literary journey transcends a mere tale of personal transformation; it represents a challen…
New York. Other Press. 2023. 352 pages. The thirteen exemplary character-driven stories in Chilean author Antonio Skármeta’s The Names of the Things That Were There, curated by Juan V…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2024. 304 pages. Old King is basically a novel about two very different men, Duane Oshun and Ted Kaczynski, mostly about the former. The novel opens with Duane…
New York. Clarion Books. 2023. 240 pages. As a career evangelist for cross-reading, that magical practice in which adults allow themselves to gleefully devour books that are supposedl…