Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink Books. 2018 (©2016). 283 pages.“Go on, pour,” Yasmin says as she has Abu Azab cauterize the leg of a rebel soldier with scalding hot oil after she has amputated i…
FICTION
Los Angeles. DoppelHouse Press. 2018. 224 pages.Malva, the debut work of Dutch poet-turned-novelist Hagar Peeters, had my commitment by page 6; for serious students of Chilean poet Pablo Neru…
Brooklyn, New York. Restless Books. 2018. 209 pages.To catalog the atrocities carried out in Emiliano Monge’s The Arid Sky is to be reminded that humanity will never run out of ways to inflic…
Easthampton, Massachusetts. Small Beer Press. 2018. 320 pages.At once lyrical and experimental, stunningly original and deeply rooted in myth, the stories that make up Ambiguity Machines and Other…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2018. 232 pages.In Kudos, Rachel Cusk continues to reinvent the genre of autofiction, seamlessly merging life and art. In this eagerly anticipated concl…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2018. 203 pages.It’s no secret that graphic novels have come of age in the twenty-first century in the sense that they are now taken seriously by readers and reviewers…
Toronto. Book*hug. 2018. 240 pages.Part domestic drama, part investigative thriller, and all intersectionality, D. Nandi Odhiambo’s fourth novel foregrounds the tension of interracial and queer relati…
Manchester, UK. Comma Press. 2018. 196 pages.There could not be a more appropriate way to represent Riga than with a short-story collection. The Baltic nations, and Latvia certainly not least among th…
New York. Atlantic Monthly Press. 2018. 368 pages.In writing workshops, I caution students against relying on coincidence to drive plot, as events that happen by chance are generally less interesting…
San Francisco. Tachyon. 2018. 288 pages.The alternate history subgenre of speculative fiction, and especially alternate history written by Jewish writers, often takes the form of meditations on the re…
New York. Knopf. 608 pages.Haruki Murakami’s massive, elegantly eerie sixteenth novel, Killing Commendatore, is a successful, surreal mashup of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, F. S…
Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern University Press. 2018. 308 pages.In Manzoor Ahtesham’s charming and thoughtful The Tale of the Missing Man, protagonist Zamir Ahmed Khan has a mysterious ill…
Arles. Actes Sud. 2018. 221 pages.Christian Garcin’s new novel puts individuals on stage who are rarely given voice in contemporary fiction. Hoyt Stapleton, Matthew McMulligan, and Steven Myers are ho…
Edinburgh. Charco Press. 2018. 226 pages.Having garnered the praise of Juan Cárdenas and Juan Villoro, young Colombian author Margarita García Robayo is being published for the first time in English i…
Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2018. 152 pages.Comemadre begins in 1907 in Buenos Aires. A doctor at a sanatorium is in love with a nurse. Other doctors are also in love with the nurse. Oth…
New York. Akashic Books. 2018. 217 pages.In the nearly fifteen years since Akashic Books premiered its Noir anthology, the short-fiction series has examined the criminal and often perilous re…
San Francisco. City Lights Books. 2018. 128 pages.Gabriela Alemán weaves noir, feminism, satire, and environmentalism into the strange history of Poso Wells, Ecuador. Poso Wells follows journ…
New York. Vintage. 2018. 132 pages.It is early December and our narrator is under pressure to complete a screenplay for a sequel to his highly popular previous comedy. He and his wife and daughter hav…
Washington, DC. Gallaudet University Press. 2018. 221 pages.Sister and Brother chronicles the lives of Albert and Helena Berg, siblings from an affluent family of musicians in nineteenth-cent…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2018. 502 pages.Approximately one-third of the way through Richard Powers’s The Overstory, a scientist whose findings had originally been attacked discovers that she i…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2018. 160 pages.Jérôme Ruillier’s The Strange is the timely, and timeless, story of a fictional undocumented immigrant’s struggle to make a new life. Througho…
Cape Town. Kwela Books. 2018. 207 pages.Niq Mhlongo’s new short-story collection begins in Soweto’s Avalon Cemetery. The narrator goes to find her absent father’s grave, superstitiously hoping that it…
Hong Kong. Signal 8 Press. 2018. 190 pages. In Insignificance, Xu Xi ambitiously claimed that she was doing a little bit of what Dream of the Red Chamber was doing—to create classic…
Simsbury, Connecticut. Mandel Vilar Press. 2018. 320 pages.Zion’s Fiction is a project many years in the making, but it was worth the wait. In this collection, readers will find a wealth of s…
Albuquerque, New Mexico. World Weaver Press. 2018. 286 pages.Solarpunk is the third installment in a triptych including Vaporpunk and Dieselpunk, all edited by Brazilian sci…