Victoria Cribb, tr. New York. Seven Stories. 2012. ISBN 978-1609804268Ovar LoveStar is the seventy-one-year-old chairman of a vast corporate entity whose tendrils infiltrate every aspect of life. In A…
FICTION
- Helen Constantine, ed. Margaret Jull Costa, tr. New York. Oxford University Press. 2012. ISBN 9780199583270Madrid Tales is a wonderful collection of short stories written by a diverse cadre o…
- Pasadena, California. Red Hen Press. 2013. ISBN 9781597092685Andrew Lam, author of the essay collections Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora and East Eats West: Writing…
- New York. Riverhead. 2013. ISBN 9781594487293When we meet the protagonist of Mohsin Hamid’s novel, he is “huddled on the packed earth” under his mother’s cot, feverish and suffering from hepatiti…
- Douglas Brinkley, ed. Johnny Depp, intro. New York. Infinitum Nihil / Harper. 2013. ISBN 9780062248398It is customary when a reviewer has personal or business relationships with the aut…
- Antony Shugaar, tr. New York. Europa. 2012. ISBN 9781609450656I Hadn’t Understood follows a lawyer named Vincenzo Malinconico who lives in Naples and has an ex-wife, two children, and a…
- Madrid. Editorial Funambulista. 2012. ISBN 9788494029325What is most striking about Diego Cornejo Menacho’s third novel is how his proliferating imagination frees just about every known narrative…
- Clifford Endres & Selhan Endres, tr. London. Telegram. 2012. ISBN 978-1846591488Selçuk Altun’s sixth novel, The Sultan of Byzantium, positions itself as a skillfully constructed tribute t…
- Michael Hofmann, tr. New York. Other Press. 2012. ISBN 9781590513248Critically acclaimed throughout European literary circles, Swiss author Peter Stamm achieved his breakthrough in the United States w…
- Adriana Hunter, tr. London. Atlantic. 2012. ISBN 9781848874183Set in World War II, during the Nazi occupation of Belgium, Noah’s Child recounts the story of Joseph, a ten-year-old c…
- Paris. Seuil. 2013. ISBN 9782021003949Alain Mabanckou is one of the most widely read and discussed African writers today. After publishing a number of well-received novels and winning several prizes,…
- New York. W.W. Norton. 2012. ISBN 9780393083217Sylvia Plath did it with the oven door ajar. John Kennedy Toole did it with a garden hose. Hart Crane did it with the famous farewell, “Goodbye, eve…
- David Williams, tr. Brooklyn, New York. Archipelago. 2012. ISBN 9781935744320Mama Leone, by Miljenko Jergović (b. 1966), has an interesting structure: the first part of the book, “W…
- Brian Bergstrom & Lucy Fraser, tr. Oakland, California. PM Press (IPG, distr.). 2012. ISBN 9781604865912“My wish is for the words in these stories to . . . lodge themselves within the b…
- Bristol. Tangent. 2012. ISBN 9781906477608My Mother Was an Upright Piano is Tania Hershman’s second collection of very short stories—her first, The White Road and Other Stories, was…
- Liesl Schillinger, tr. New York / London. Viking / Chatto & Windus. 2012. ISBN 9780670023509 / 0701186944Readers and foreign presses have embraced Every Day, Every Hour as an enchant…
- Minneapolis, Minn. Milkweed. 2013. ISBN 9781571310972In Tamas Dobozy’s previous book, Last Notes and Other Stories (see WLT Nov. 2006, 55), Hungarian survivors of World War II are ju…
- Ljouwert, Netherlands. Friese Pers. 2012. ISBN 9789033002625In this slim novel, Sietse de Vries continues to play with variations on the crime-novel formula. In Kugels foar Kant (see WLT…
- New York. Harper. 2012. ISBN 9780061493348Michael Chabon’s novel Telegraph Avenue, on a basic level, is about work life and home life in Oakland, California. Longtime friends Archy and Nat ow…
- Mexico City. Alfaguara. 2013. ISBN 9786071123688Through the intricate plot and multitude of characters, both principal and peripheral, Carmen Boullosa’s novel Texas seems to score a dire…
- New York. Simon & Schuster. 2012. ISBN 9781451633924A June 2012 Indie Next pick, this first novel follows six years in the life of an educated middle-class Athenian family, its father long dead, a…
- Sally-Ann Spencer, tr. London. Harvill Secker. 2012. ISBN 9781846554278Sympathy for a terrorist? Rebellion against preventive health-care measures? In Germany, Juli Zeh is a highly visible political a…
- Barcelona. Anagrama. 2012. ISBN 978-8433972359It is no accident that Juan Villoro is classified as a postmodern author. We know that, in general, literary criticism resorts to the postmodern label whe…
- Toronto. Doubleday Canada. 2012. ISBN 9780385667142The Magic of Saida, set in India, East Africa, and Canada, is the latest novel by the prolific African Asian Canadian author M. G. Vassanji.…
- Peter Sherwood, tr. London. Stork Press. 2012. ISBN 9780957132665In the first paragraph of this “were-tale for six actors, five voices, two players,” narrator Jerne Voltampere proffers fair warni…