New York. Hogarth. 2012. ISBN 9780307955890At the beginning of The Watch, Nizam, a young woman from a mountain village in Afghanistan, arrives in a clearing outside a US outpost, using her ha…
FICTION
- Lytton Smith, tr. Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2012. ISBN 9781934824351In the opening scene of Children in Reindeer Woods, Rafael and some fellow soldiers come across a farm. The soldier…
- Max Weiss, tr. Cairo. American University in Cairo Press (Oxford University Press, distr.). 2011. ISBN 9789774164804Set on the eve of the Iraq War, A Tunisian Tale reveals a westernized elite…
- Daniel Bowles, tr. Las Vegas, Nevada. AmazonCrossing. 2011. ISBN 9781611090574Vivian Atkinson, the eponymous protagonist of Thomas Meinecke’s 1998 novel, is the child of a German mother and an America…
- Francesco Leggio, tr. Rome. Edizioni e/o. 2011. ISBN 9788866320128World Literature Today readers have met Algerian-born novelist Amara Lakhous before and may recall the lead character in his…
- New York. Bloomsbury. 2012. ISBN 9781608198108When an astronaut who has experienced weightlessness returns to an almost empty home, afflicted by earth’s gravity, the reader can hardly be surprised tha…
- Thomas Lamarre & Kazuko Y. Behrens, tr. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press. 2012. ISBN 9780816654550Paris, 1948. In local cafés, surrealists “ruined by the war” gather regularly around vis…
- Helge Dascher, tr. Montréal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2012. ISBN 9781770460713Guy Delisle is comics’ travelographer du jour, a restless Quebecois whose thoughtful graphic narratives of ex…
- New York. Knopf. 2012. ISBN 9780307594167Since its release in May, Toni Morrison’s recent novel Home has been criticized for its brevity. With only 145 pages to boast, it departs from such mo…
- New York. Knopf. 2012. ISBN 9780307594167Toni Morrison’s tenth novel, Home, focuses on a Korean War veteran, Frank Money, and his sister Ycindra (Cee) Money, whom he leaves behind in Lotcus,…
- Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, tr. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2012. isbn 9780374119393 Andrés Neuman’s Traveler of the Century reflects Latin America’s “total novel,” bruta…
- Paris. Gallimard. 2011. ISBN 9782070134601Rue Darwin is Boualem Sansal’s fourth novel. His third, Le Village de l’Allemand (2008; Eng. The German Mujahid, 2009), re…
- Barcelona. Anagrama. 2011 (© 2010). ISBN 9788433972156We are so accustomed to the proliferation of the detective novel in Latin America that in the last few years we have barely noticed that many of t…
- Montréal. Lévesque. 2012. ISBN 9782923844824With a title that automatically evokes Franz Kafka’s unfinished first novel, Amerika provides a jarringly absurd version of the traditional immigra…
- Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverston, and Nathan Englander, tr. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2012. ISBN 978-0374533335 Some stories are hard to get out of your head, and Etgar Keret wri…
- New York. Random House. 2012. ISBN 978-0812992793The Orphan Master’s Son follows Jun Do, a man searching for identity while succumbing to the impulsive and oppressive whims of the North Korea…
- New York. Knopf. 2012. ISBN 9780307958310In his second novel, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, Mohammed Hanif explores the relationships among caste, gender, and religion in modern Pakistan through…
- New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2012. ISBN 9780374222642Nadine Gordimer’s latest novel adds to the growing body of literature expressing discontent with the social, economic, and political cond…
- Montréal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2012. ISBN 9781770460652As the graphic novel has developed as a form globally over the twentieth century, one expectation it has rarely been able to shed is lengt…
- Paris. Gallimard. 2012. ISBN 9782070134816Libar Fofana, whose father was imprisoned and tortured in one of Sékou Touré’s prisons, escaped from Guinea in 1976, when he was seventeen. After working in E…
- Randall A. Major, tr. Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2012. ISBN 9781934824580The Cyclist Conspiracy, Svetislav Basara’s second novel to be translated into English (expertly by Randall A. M…
- Imre Goldstein, tr. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2011. ISBN 9780374229764Péter Nádas’s monumental, labyrinthine novel, Parallel Stories, is the first of his works of fiction not wri…
- New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2011. ISBN 9780374108991The Barbarian Nurseries is the Great American Novel for our “messy and complicated present.” The Torres-Thompson household lives…
- Bogdan Rakić & John Jeffries, trs. Belgrade, Serbia. Geopoetika. 2011. ISBN 9788661450709With Farewell Gift, Vladimir Tasić has written a concerto. Like a musical composition, his short n…
- Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf. 2012. ISBN 9781555976026Already an established young talent in the United Kingdom for writing London and the South-East and The Innocent, David Szal…