Madrid / Bogotá. Alfaguara. 2013. ISBN 9788420415574 / 9789587586008Colombian author Fernando Vallejo (b. 1942, Medellín) is currently in a privileged position within the world of literature written i…
FICTION
Lima. Alfaguara. 2013. ISBN 9786123090999 Raúl Tola is one of Peru’s most respected print and television journalists; in addition, he is an accomplished fiction writer, as his third novel,…
Budapest. Magvető. 2014. ISBN 9789631431667László Szilasi’s novel Szentek hárfája (see WLT, Jan. 2011, 68) was largely about the history of his hometown, Békéscsaba, in southeas…
Michael F. Moore, tr. New York. New York Review Books. 2014. ISBN 9781590177235 Alberto Moravia (1907–1990) is a writer who deserves to be more widely read than he is these days. The author of co…
New York. Knopf. 2014. ISBN 9780307266385The temptation to use the term “ripped from the headlines” is strong, but this remarkably moving novel about the kidnapping of thirty African girls predat…
Sue Branford, tr. London. Latin American Bureau. 2013. ISBN 9781899365777In Bernardo Kucinski’s novel K, an elderly man searches for his adult daughter, a political militant who vanishes at t…
Michael M. Naydan, ed. London. Glagoslav. 2014. ISBN 9781909156012The common thread that unites the diverse works of fiction presented in Herstories is that they were all written by Ukra…
Clarissa Botsford, tr. London / New York. And Other Stories. 2014. ISBN 9781908276346 Sworn Virgin, winner of the English PEN Award, highlights the consequences of a little-known cu…
Paris. Gallimard. 2014. ISBN 9782070146284 In his third novel, Ousmane Diarra (who works as a librarian in Bamako) describes the disasters caused by the Islamic fundamentalists who have attempted…
Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France. Cheyne. 2014. ISBN 9782841161973 Marie Cosnay’s latest novel, like many of her other books, involves a quest for origins, as a young woman named Helen searches for…
Iowa City. Rescue Press (SPD, distr.). 2013. ISBN 9780988587335One aspiration of many writers is to maintain a comical thread throughout a serious work. Jonathan Blum is just such a writer. In his deb…
Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Algonquin. 2014. ISBN 9781616203214Recently widowed A. J. Fikry seems the last person on Alice Island to whom one would entrust a toddler named Maya. But he owns a bo…
New York. The New Press. 2014. ISBN 9781595589620 Mercia Murray has been abandoned. Disposed of and dumped by her lover of twenty-four years. She attempts to make sense of a senseless act. A…
Maureen Freely & Alexander Dawe, tr. New York. Penguin. 2013. ISBN 9780143106739 “The privilege I most treasured as a child was that of freedom,” says Hayri İrdal in The Time Re…
Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky. Hard to Be a God. Olena Bormashenko, tr. Hari Kunzru, intro. Chicago. Chicago Review Press. 2014. ISBN 9781613748282———. Definitely Maybe: A…
Anastasia Maximova & Peter Bush, tr. London. MacLehose. 2013. ISBN 9780857051585Russian Stories is a collection of twenty-one short stories supposedly written by authors who, accordi…
Shaun Whiteside, tr. New York. Bloomsbury. 2014. ISBN 9781620403389Inge Lohmark teaches biology at a “gymnasium” in a backwater town in the remotest former East Germany, which, even more than mos…
Edward Gauvin, tr. Christophe Blain, ill. London / New York. SelfMadeHero / Abrams. 2014. ISBN 9781906838782Weapons of Mass Diplomacy demonstrates indisputably that a graphic novel can p…
New York. Dr. Cicero Books. 2014. ISBN 9780615917061John M. Keller’s The Box and the Briefcase, the Moleque and the Old Man and the First Coming of the Second Son of God is the latest in a lo…
Michelle Hartman, tr. Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink. 2014. ISBN 9781566569620 Iman Humaydan is a Lebanese writer with two acclaimed novels to her credit, B as in Beirut and W…
Dhaka, Bangladesh. Daily Star Books. 2013. ISBN 9789849027195 Explicitly aware of Farah Ghuznavi’s famed pedigree and background as a development consultant for over two decades with the non…
Lanham, Maryland. Hamilton Books / Rowman & Littlefield. 2013. ISBN 9780761861744The secret of Rose-Anne Riley was that she had been raped in her youth by Philip Arlington, the brash only son…
New York. Hogarth. 2014. ISBN 9780804139090Ruby is a cluster of arresting stories and savory exchanges among the black inhabitants of a town named Liberty in East Texas. The stories crea…
Ann Goldstein, tr. San Francisco. McSweeney’s Books. 2014. ISBN 9781938073960 There are two novellas in this volume, either of which might easily stand on its own. Yet they complement each o…
New York. Riverhead. 2013. ISBN 9781594631719In 2008 the New Yorker published “The Idiot President,” a story unpublished in English that, according to Daniel Alarcón, had as a source the thea…