Oakland, California. Transit Books. 2018. 160 pages.Despite being slim, Blue Self-Portrait is at once dizzying and—at times—exhausting. Lefebvre’s first novel to be translated into English is…
FICTION
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2018. 328 pages.First published in 2014 at the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine’s east, Serhiy Zhadan’s Mesopotamia tells the story of Kharkiv,…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2018. 68 pages.Anna Haifisch’s absurdist graphic novel Von Spatz is brilliant, weird, and darkly funny. Von Spatz is a tribute to artists, by an arti…
Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2018. 400 pages.Despite Transparent City’s focus on a community slipping down a precipice and toward urban demise, Ondjaki’s prose pulses with life. In the hours…
New York. Penguin Random House. 2018. 320 pages.You-Jeong Jeong’s The Good Son is a precise, meticulously plotted thriller that is occasionally too precise and meticulous for its own good.The…
New York. New Directions. 2018 (©2016). 304 pages.Marcia Douglas, born in the UK and raised in Jamaica, is a novelist and poet who currently teaches creative writing and Caribbean literature at the Un…
Brooklyn, New York. Restless Books. 2018. 208 pages.Two things happen in Cuban science-fiction writer Yoss’s third novel in English. First, Josué Valdés—once an orphan living in the radioactive wastes…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2018. 266 pages.This intricate novel is packed with ruminations on scientific research, mortality, and the military-industrial complex, but at its core The Bottom…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 256 pages.One January morning, three young women in different Scandinavian cities wake up, and Gunnhild Øyehaug starts examining their inner lives. A 2008 No…
New York. New Directions. 2018. 160 pages.I Didn’t Talk, Beatriz Bracher’s first novel to be published in English, revisits the Brazilian military dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985,…
Brooklyn. Restless Books. 2018. 452 pages.It would be an understatement to call Moon Brow, the latest novel by Shahriar Mandanipour (translated from Persian by Sara Khalili), anything but “wo…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2018 (©2017). 416 pages.One of Europe’s most important and original voices finally, after many years, has a new book on the English-language market. Olga Tokarczuk (pronounc…
Mumbai. Almost Island. 2017. 155 pages.Works of fiction are sometimes excerpted in literary magazines ahead of their publication. Baroni: A Journey, Sergio Chejfec’s eighth book and his fourt…
New York. Europa Editions. 2018. 253 pages.In his novel Athenian Women, newly translated from the Italian, Alessandro Barbero attempts to give us a view of daily life in ancient Athens during…
Manchester, UK. Comma Press. 2018. 70 pages.In 2017 President Trump made the contentious decision to institute a travel ban that effectively barred individuals from seven different countries from ente…
Arles, France. Actes Sud. 2017. 328 pages. “Writing is the only effective ruse against death. People have tried prayer, drugs, magic, endelessly repeated verses, or immobility, but I believe I am the…
Madrid. Alfaguara. 2017. 552 pages. In his latest novel, Berta Isla, Spanish writer Javier Marías delivers an intense, emotionally charged story based on what, at first sight, could be label…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 179 pages]Paolo Maurensig’s Theory of Shadows uses the game of chess as a vehicle to meditate on the Holocaust. Its central character is the infamou…
New York. New York Review Comics. 2018. 112 pages.Comics have the unique capacity to create meaning between the verbal and visual as illustrations challenge and surprise the reader, but few comics cap…
Dallas. Deep Vellum. 2017. 384 pages.“This book is composed of three different narratives. For reasons that I do not understand, it was given to me to turn into a novel.” These words of a fictitious a…
London. Pushkin Press. 2018. 92 pages.Ms Ice Sandwich is a delightful novella by Akutagawa Prize winner Mieko Kawakami (b. 1976) that asks us to join an unnamed narrator, with an obsessive in…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2018. 128 pages.Lion Cross Point is about a young boy named Takeru, vacillating between his traumatic past and present and coming uncomfortably close to the pa…
Los Angeles. Dopplehouse Press. 2018. 384 pages.When, in the late nineteenth century, H. G. Wells set out to satirize capitalism, industrialization, and the Victorian class system, he chose evolution…
New York. Europa Editions. 2018. 320 pages.Disoriental is the first novel of Négar Djavadi, a screenwriter based in Paris. It travels to Djavadi’s birthplace, Iran, to tell the saga of the Sa…
New York. New Directions. 2018. 240 pages.Prolific Norwegian author Dag Solstad redesigns fiction in Armand V, his fourth English translation. The original subtitle, Footnotes to an Unexc…