London. Bloomsbury. 2018. 283 pages.
The ghastliness of war and its consequent unsavory realities are subtly captured in Mohammed Hanif’s recent novel, Red Birds. Hanif demonstrates his fine…
FICTION
New York. Viking. 2018. 528 pages. “Too long for a detective novel,” thinks the genre fan, hefting The Witch Elm. But it’s Tana French, so expectations are high. The protagonist, Toby…
Calcutta. Seagull Books. 2018. 256 pages. Who am I? And who are you? Suzanne Dracius explores identity in her recently translated novel, The Dancing Other. First published in French as L…
Oslo. Samlaget. 2018. 451 pages. Når landet mørknar (When darkness falls over the land) is a powerful historical novel, but it also has the visionary qualities that mark it as a great work o…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 416 pages. Dror Burstein is fascinated by prophesies of annihilation. His previous novel to be translated into English, Netanya (2010), was a…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2019. 640 pages. Fantasy, as we’re familiar with it in the global genre market, is a primarily Western-centric affair shaped by the writing of white men with many initials—…
New York. Tor Books. 2019. 480 pages. Broken Stars is author, translator, and editor Ken Liu’s second anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction in English translation, and it’s been…
London. Istros Books. 2018. 159 pages. Comprising “Artur and Isabella” and “Pupi,” this slim volume distills Daša Drndić’s trademark themes into a bleak but haunting requiem for the soul’s death in t…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2018. 136 pages. One of the many reasons Wolfgang Hilbig left the German Democratic Republic might have been that, as his narrator suddenly realizes, all at once there…
New York. New York Review Books. 2019. 304 pages. The twelve scintillating short stories in Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories, the first English collection by cardiologist Maxim…
Trans. Lucia Graves. New York. Harper. 2018. 805 pages. The Labyrinth of the Spirits is the fourth novel in a tetralogy by Carlos Ruiz Zafón that takes place in the literary universe of the…
Belgrade, Serbia. Cadmus Press. 2018. 246 pages. Tanja Maljartschuk’s A Biography of a Chance Miracle is a deceptively complex take on post-Soviet Ukrainian culture. Maljartschuk, known in U…
New York. New Directions. 2018. 122 pages. At ninety-one, revered Mexican writer Amparo Dávila has had a long and illustrious life in letters. Born in Zacatecas in 1928, she went to the nation’s capi…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2018. 373 pages. Nuruddin Farah’s latest novel, North of Dawn, is a book that epitomizes the existential crisis of the twenty-first century. It is a novel t…
New York. Pantheon. 2019. 320 pages. The Other Americans is Laila Lalami’s fourth full-length novel. Whereas her previous novels featured stories that unfolded at least partially in Mo…
New York. Knopf. 2018. 304 pages. Although the principal setting is 2017, the first part of Anne Tyler’s Clock Dance is divided into particular years—1967, 1977, 1997—each corresponding to a…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2018. 280 pages. In Kim Sagwa’s English-language debut, the pressures of being a teenage girl take two friends down a dark, twisted path within the competitive world o…
Cairo. American University in Cairo Press. 2018. 216 pages. It’s no accident that the epigraph to this novel is from Nikos Kazantzakis’s Report to Greco: “I said to the almond tree, ‘Speak t…
Austin, Texas. A Strange Object. 2018. 236 pages. “Quirky and amazing” are the persistent words one might utter after reading each of the seventeen stories in Rita Bullwinkel’s debut collection, …
İstanbul. Heyamola. 2018. 88 pages. In this playful and provocatively ironic book, Fırat Caner makes his readers suspect the foundations of alleged truths and provides a critique of cultural an…
Cologne, Germany. Eichborn Verlag. 2018. 428 pages. How does someone turn into the person they don’t want to be? Franziska Hauser answers this question in her autofictional book, Die Gewitterschw…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2018. 211 pages. The reservoir of material for comedy, either stand-up or on the page, is often autobiographical, and this is certainly the case for Aline Kominsky-Cr…
El Paso, Texas. Cinco Puntos Press. 2018. 208 pages. Weaving together the voices of Lucia and Magdalena, two Maya women friends, Christine Eber, like the backstrap-loom weavers in the novel, exquisit…
London. Pushkin Press. 2018. Playwright and novelist Toshiki Okada (b. 1973) offers two uncomfortable vignettes of young people adrift in a world apparently without safe harbor in The End of the…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 195 pages. Our hero, the no-longer-young Swiss director Emil Nägeli, with thus far one cutting-edge film to his credit, finds himself, his natively sober ju…