San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2017. 108 pages.The setting of Old Rendering Plant is the German Democratic Republic in which Wolfgang Hilbig grew up. In a veritable perversion of the convent…
FICTION
Easthampton, Massachusetts. Small Beer Press. 400 pages.Su Wei currently teaches Chinese language and literature at Yale University, and The Invisible Valley is his first novel available in E…
New York. Atria. 2018. 224 pages.With over thirty foreign rights sales, this first novel has won the 2017 Strega, Strega Giovani, and the Prix Médicis étranger. Beyond its mountain setting and underst…
New York. New Directions. 2018. 128 pages.In her latest book, Yoko Tawada describes a dystopian Japan after an unspecified disaster: the ground is contaminated, food growth is limited to certain regio…
New York. Archipelago Books. 2018. 270 pages.The folkloric stories in Pearls on a Branch feature protagonists, often young women, who work to shape their future through generosity and clevern…
Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2018. 232 pages.Part family history, part lost love story, and mostly memoirish novel, Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s experiment with fragmented narrative augmented by illu…
Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2018. 375 pages.The eponymous farm at the heart of Héctor Abad’s new novel is tucked into a verdant corner of northwest Colombia. Known as La Oculta, it’s “a good hiding p…
London. Fitzcarraldo Editions. 2017. 400 pages. The five characters in Companions struggle with the trials and tribulations of middle age in the twenty-first century. Loneliness and isolat…
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London. Oneworld. 2017. 485 pages.“They know not what they do” is a plea for forgiveness, but in the context of this remarkable novel, the phrase takes on an unforgiving note. True, Jussi Valtonen wri…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2017. 312 pages.Celebrated Spanish novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina’s new novel, Like a Fading Shadow, is a detailed work with multiple narrative threads wov…
New York. Simon & Schuster. 2017. 132 pages.In this compact and evocative historical novel, a filmmaker flees from the scene of the twentieth century’s greatest crime, only to find his family enme…
New York. Feminist Press. 2017. 136 pages.The Iliac Crest is a bizarre and mystifying gothic tale told from the perspective of a cynical and paranoid narrator, a doctor obsessed with the ocea…
Paris. Flammarion. 2017. 880 pages.There’s something quirky, something darkly hilarious, about everything Grégoire Bouillier decides to set on the page. Not only are the scenarios he describes somethi…
London. Jantar. 2017. 129 pages.I wanted to like Balla’s In the Name of the Father, I really did. I was intrigued by the promise of a Slovak Kafka; I wanted to experience the Eastern European…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2017. 346 pages.Far too little is written about or by the Armenian peoples. Granted, the Republic of Armenia is a small country (population: 3 million),…
Berlin. Suhrkamp Verlag. 2017. 365 pages.The first sentence of Ausser sich (Beside yourself)—“Ich weiß nicht, wohin es geht, alle anderen wissen es, ich nicht” (I don’t know where we…
New York. Grove Press. 288 pages.A 743-page manuscript by a writer with the pen name of Bandi (“Firefly” in Korean) was reputedly smuggled out of North Korea and into China in 2013. The English public…
New York. New Directions. 2017. 351 pages.László Krasznahorkai’s latest book to be translated into English, The World Goes On, is one of the strangest books I’ve come across in quite some tim…
London. Old Street. 2017. 160 pages.Thirteen-year-old Auguste (Gus) Sutter vividly remembers the summer of 1976, not just for the preternaturally harsh drought but also for the incidents lea…
Vancouver. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2017. 300 pages.With an orchestra of players on the stage of the streets of Montreal, Julie Maroh conducts a symphony of the human condition in Body Music. Thro…
New York. Scribner. 2017. 438 pages.Readers have come to expect novels that experiment with form and structure from Jennifer Egan, but Manhattan Beach proves that expectations can be unmet in…
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Furari. Doddington, United Kingdom. Fanfare / Ponent Mon. 2017. 208 pages.Venice. Doddington, United Kingdom. Fanfare / Ponent Mon. 2017. 120 pages…
Stockholm. Albert Bonniers. 2017. 344 pages.Vera is a strange book: the darkly glittering wrapping of high romance conceals a bitter core, a compound of the collaborator’s secret shame and gu…
New York. New Directions. 2017. 378 pages.Belladonna’s title is a deadly plant; its Latin epigraph warns a society on a suicidal path: “Today it’s me, tomorrow . . . you. Who can escape?” Thi…
Paris. Gallimard. 2017. 223 pages.The Senegalese author Tidiane N’Diaye is known for such historical works as Le Génocide voilé (Gallimard, 2008) and Par-delà les ténèbres blanches (…