New York. Penguin Books. 2018. 288 pages.Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the first Iraqi novel to do so), Frankenstein in Baghdad is a dark, surreal tale of a creature b…
FICTION
Berkeley, California. Counterpoint. 2018. 192 pages.Ismail Kadare is one of the most lauded writers-in-translation in the English language, certainly one of Europe’s most important writers, and virtua…
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New York. Bloomsbury USA. 2017. 384 pages.Istanbul and Oxford are over 1,600 miles apart, yet Turkish author Elif Shafak pulls them together in her tenth novel, Three Daughters of Eve. Shafak…
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Dallas. Deep Vellum. 2017. 300 pages.From the first pages of her new novel, Alisa Ganieva toys with the expectations of her readers. Her title, Bride and Groom, seems to promise a traditional…
New York. Harper. 2017. 266 pages.The war for earth is over; the earth lost. That, in a nutshell, is the opening situation in The Book of Joan. Some of the powerful have escaped to a sor…
Gurgaon, India. Penguin Books. 2017. 186 pages.Perumal Murugan is a contemporary Tamil author whose works mostly focus on the lives of the vulnerable and the disadvantaged. Current Show is hi…
Albany, California. Stone Bridge Press. 2017. 208 pages.Set during the American occupation of Okinawa, In the Woods of Memory centers on two events that send cracks running out in every direc…
Boston. Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2017. 259 pages.Young-Ha Kim’s I Hear Your Voice begins with a lens at once magical and perturbing as the reader glimpses the Express Bus Te…
Frankfurt am Main. S. Fischer. 2017. 139 pages.In Klaus Böldl’s latest novel, Der Atem der Vögel, the narrator, Philipp, came to the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic between Scotland and I…
Bloomington, Indiana. Slavica / Three String Books. 2017. 185 pages.The translators of Into the Spotlight have set out to expand the body of contemporary Slovak fiction available in English,…
New York. Arcade. 2017. 208 pages.The Hole, by Hye-young Pyun, one of South Korea’s most notable writers, embarks on an intriguing premise. What happens when a successful life is destroyed af…
Windsor, Canada. Biblioasis. 2017. 331 pages.Crime novels are commonly praised as “page-turners,” but there is a different kind of excellence in which each page invites savoring. To hurry through such…
Paris. Don Quichotte éditions. 2017. 166 pages.With En compagnie des hommes, Véronique Tadjo brings the 2014–2016 Ebola crisis into sharp focus, reminding us that it is still very much a thre…
New York. New York Review Books Classics. 2017. 235 pages.Katalin Street is the third Magda Szabó novel to be published by New York Review Books Classics. Szabó, who died in 2007, was a Hunga…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2017. 256 pages.Elvira Navarro’s latest novel hinges largely on two questions: How do we know we’re being told the truth, and how does that lack of certainty influence…
New York. The Mantle. 2017. 280 pages.Winner of the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature, this deceptively simple and straightforward novel of day-to-day life in the small village of Ivona in western Ke…
New York. Other Press. 2017. 160 pages.Which life makes us happy? And what are we to do once we realize that the life we lead does not? With To the Back of Beyond, Swiss author Peter Stamm ha…
Brooklyn. Akashic Books. 2017. 158 pages.Achy Obejas’s new book, The Tower of the Antilles, amply fulfills the promise of the author’s earlier work. These stories are about borders—physical a…
San Francisco. City Lights. 2017. 128 pages.Contemporary Turkish writer and journalist Aslı Erdoğan’s new short-story collection, The Stone Building and Other Places, which won the prestigiou…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2017. 272 pages.Dogs at the Perimeter is the second novel by Madeleine Thien. Her first novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Bo…
New York. Knopf. 2017. 227 pages.Men without Women comprises seven short stories, four of which have appeared in other publications. All display elements of Haruki Murakami’s fiction that rea…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2017. 320 pages.Korean author Bae Suah’s latest writing, although a collection of short stories, is equally as experimental, cutting-edge, and captivating as her nove…
New York. Knopf. 2017. 449 pages.Many reviews of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness have discussed its engagement with the larger political history of India’s last two decades a…
New York. The New Press. 2017. 199 pages.A beautiful amalgam of childlike optimism and the harshness of reality, Alain Mabanckou’s Black Moses solidifies the author’s status as a modern maste…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2017. 248 pages.Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short-story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, reveals a new herald for the New Weird, marking Machado as one of…