Victoria, Texas. Dalkey Archive Press. 2016. 163 pages.
A writer once told me that each work of fiction teaches you how to read its world. The novel A Contrived World is at once a world and n…
FICTION
Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2016. 250 pages. Christos Ikonomou’s award-winning second collection, Something Will Happen, You’ll See, is a thoughtful glimpse into the flawed and sometimes-c…
New York. Hogarth. 2016. 192 pages. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is a taut novel that tells the story of two sisters—Yeong-hye and In-hye—and their marriages. Told in three parts, each a novell…
New York. Europa Editions. 2016. 133 pages. The Man Who Snapped His Fingers tells the story of a colonel from the inner circle of the Iranian supreme commander who now lives in another count…
Miami. Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial. 2015. 250 pages. Chilean writer Carla Guelfenbein’s Contigo en la distancia is the 2015 winner of the prestigious Alfaguara Novel Prize. The nove…
Los Angeles. Unnamed Press. 2015. 133 pages. Well known for The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner(1976), a magnificent novel about identity and belonging, Peruvian novelist Isaac Goldember…
New York. Europa Editions. 2015. 210 pages. In her latest book, French novelist Anna Gavalda brings together two novellas exploring the young, restless, and downtrodden on the edge of a breakthrough.…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2016. 272 pages. The present, in part, is the continuous rewriting of past and future—the modification of historical narratives to suit a particular message or goal. In his…
Manchester. Comma Press. 2015. 218 pages. A collection of nine short stories, Points of Origin is the first volume of Shenyang writer Diao Dou’s work to appear in English. Born in 1…
Paris. Grasset. 2015. 396 & 382 pages. As if she were a manic, female counterpart to Michel Houellebecq, Virginie Despentes’s novels overflow with violence, second-wave feminism, and restlessness…
Montreal. Lévesque éditeur. 2015. 141 pages. Xavier-Nicolas, the narrator of this idiosyncratic novel, used to be a district attorney in French-speaking Canada. When he prosecutes top-ranking members…
Syracuse, New York. Syracuse University Press. 2015. 235 pages. Jordanian author Hisham Bustani has a new book adeptly translated from Arabic into English—a set of fascinating experimental works that…
Brooklyn. Melville House. 2016. 196 pages. Serge Brussolo is largely unknown in the English-speaking world; The Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome is the first of his books to be translated into Engli…
Paris. Grasset. 2015. 494 pages. In 2010 Laurent Binet published a very promising first novel, HHhH, which recounted the 1942 assassination of Nazi general Reinhard Heydrich by Czech resistan…
Ljouwert, Netherlands. Elikser Uitgeverij. 2015. 311 pages. In 2010 Koos Tiemersma intimated that Under Water would be his last published novel. Fortunately, and to the delight of his appreci…
New York. New Directions. 2015. 220 pages. This “novel” is published in tandem with A Brief History of Portable Literature, the 1985 prose work that brought Enrique Vila-Matas sustained promi…
Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2016. 250 pages. Mattis, the protagonist of Norwegian Tarjei Vesaas’s 1957 novel The Birds, surely deserves a place among the cadre of unforgettable characters i…
New York. Simon & Schuster. 2015. 359 pages. “Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us.” This quote from Franz Kafka kicks off Australian Steve Toltz’s Quicksand—hi…
London. Darf. 2015. 378 pages. Few non-Western cities have penetrated our consciousness like Benghazi, Libya, following the 2012 attack on the American mission there, yet most of us know little about…
Paris. Alma. 2015. 263 pages. Pierre Raufast’s latest novel begins rather grippingly with a getaway scene in which a middle-aged teacher confides in the reader that he is hiding one of his teenage pu…
New York. Minotaur Books. 2015. 320 pages. Those unfamiliar with Qiu Xiaolong’s Inspector Chen series may want to read all or some of the earlier novels prior to reading this newest one, if only to be…
New Romney, UK. Jantar (Dufour Editions, distr.). 2014. 344 pages. Three Faces of an Angel is a captivating three-generational Czech saga spanning the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to…
Athens, Ohio. Ohio University Press. 2015. 235 pages. Mrs. Shaw takes place in two vastly different settings: the Kwatee Republic, a fictitious, pan-African name for Kenya, and Madison, Wisc…
Rochester, NY. Open Letter. 2015. 190 pages. Some books demand a slow reading, requiring a period of acclimation. We pick them up in intervals, glimpse their interiors with trepidation. Such is the ca…
New York. Tor. 2015. 512 pages. Suppose you know with certainty that in four hundred years a cosmic event will obliterate the human race. Suppose, for example, you are a brilliant strategist and forme…