San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2021. 156 pages.
FIGHTING A DREADFUL illness, the eponymous narrator of this sobering novel reflects on a life shaped by personal misfortune and broad…
FICTION
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2021. 260 pages. SLIPPING IS THE FOURTH novel by Mohamed Kheir, the prolific Egyptian poet, novelist, and journalist, as well a…
Dallas. Deep Vellum. 2021. 238 pages. DEFYING DEFINITION AND regaining it only through comparison with formidable authors who take their art seriously, Magda Cârneci’s FEM i…
New York. Penguin Random House. 2021. 208 pages. A DEAD BABY and her haunted great-niece open The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Mariana Enriquez’s collection of disquietin…
Bloomington, Indiana. Slavica Publishers. 2020. 265 pages. “PLEASE, YOU CAN’T look at everything through the lens of politics.” Such is the impassioned plea fr…
Cheshire. Honford Star. 2021. 176 pages. THIS PANDEMIC YEAR has felt like a dystopia to many of us—we were told to stay away from family and friends, urged to remain inside our homes…
New York. Knopf. 2021. 288 pages. DEVOTED READERS OF the wondrously gifted sixty-six-year-old Israeli author David Grossman eventually fall hopelessly in love with him. There is a ma…
Evanston, Illinois. Curbstone Books. 2021. 133 pages. BENEATH ITS BUSTLING marketplace and wondrous architecture, Fez, Morocco, is no less susceptible to hatred. Tahar Ben Jello…
Austin. University of Texas Press. 2020. 232 pages. THE WIND TRAVELER is the latest novel to appear in English by Alonso Cueto, an author known for his Redención…
New York. HarperCollins. 2021. 356 pages. WE KNOW YOU REMEMBER is the second novel by Swedish writer Tove Alsterdal to be translated into English. Three other novels ha…
Dallas. Deep Vellum. 2021. 168 pages. IT IS ALWAYS cause for excitement and anticipation when a foreign writer is translated, into any language, but especially into English, where th…
New York. New Directions. 2021. 96 pages. ARGENTINE LITERARY GIANT César Aira chronicles a series of absurd and magical coincidences in this slim novel, whose disjointed narrative sl…
New York. Other Press. 2021. 176 pages. A SINGER, NOVELIST, and activist of progressive, secular renown, Zülfü Livaneli returns to anglophone readers with a slim narrative, polished…
New York. New Directions. 2021. 96 pages. TO CLASSIFY ANNE CARSON’S version of Euripides’ play The Trojan Women as a translation is to use the term lightly, for, in collabor…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2021. 402 pages. IN DISCUSSIONS OF writers considered to be pushing the limits of the traditional detective story, the works of Cuban writer Leon…
Sheffield, UK. Tilted Axis Press. 2020. 220 pages. YAN GE’S Strange Beasts of China immerses you in its world through a series of interconnected tales, each one focusin…
Middleton, Connecticut. Wesleyan University Press. 2020. 354 pages. THE PREFACE OF Satie on the Seine announces fifty letters written by Basile Hudon Beaulieu from Paris, Fr…
New York. Penguin. 2020. 407 pages. PHIL KLAY’S COLLECTION of short stories, Redeployment (2014), dealt with the Iraq War, sometimes directly, sometimes as remembered or rel…
New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2021. 272 pages. IN AN ERA WHEN alienation and anomie are daily topics, Will McPhail’s graphic novel In. will resonate with many readers…
New York. Seagull Books. 2020. 344 pages. A LAND LIKE YOU follows Egypt from 1918 to 1952, as Western commodity capitalism, wars, foreign occupation, and imported ideol…
New York. Ecco Press. 2021. 288 pages. WHAT DOES IT MEAN to reach for relevance? Stacking a historical genocide atop a modern tragedy makes for careful considerations. After all, Che…
Cairo. Hoopoe. 2020. 324 pages. RASHA ADLY'S NOVEL The Girl with Braided Hair tells parallel love stories, with one set in contemporary Egypt, post-2011 uprising, and the ot…
New York. Abrams. 2021. 288 pages. PUBLISHED AS Girl in White Cotton in India, the Dubai-based American novelist Avni Doshi’s rechristened Booker-nominated debut, B…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2021. 176 pages. [Trigger warning: The following review mentions a sexual assault.] ARGENTINE AUTHOR Pola Oloixarac me…
New York. Doubleday. 2020. 208 pages. THOUGH NO GHOSTS move through its pages, Kevin Barry’s That Old Country Music is a catalog of hauntings. The characters who populate th…