London. Peirene Press. 2018. 190 pages.Every so often, you come across a book so beautiful that you ration the pages to extend it. Nora Ikstena’s Soviet Milk is most certainly one of these.Se…
FICTION
London. Oneworld. 2018. 387 pages.Eugene Vodolazkin’s engaging new novel opens with a mystery. The main character—Innokenty Petrovich Platonov—wakes up in a hospital ward in 1999 with no memory of who…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 272 pages.The first entry in a planned trilogy, Mia Couto’s Woman of the Ashes is a beautiful and grotesque force interweaving history with myth. At…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2018. 308 pages.Neustadt Prize winner Dubravka Ugrešić’s latest historiographic metafiction bears her trademark erudition, wit, and nuanced cultural critiques. The fo…
Milwaukee. Cissus World Press. 2017. 563 pages.Accra-born novelist and Harvard-trained lawyer Benjamin Kwakye’s recent novel, The Count’s False Banquet, is a phenomenal tale with an enchantin…
New York. Vintage Books. 2017. 401 pages.Switching between detective fiction (the Kurt Wallander series) and novels entailed risks for the late Henning Mankell. If a mystery remained at the center, de…
London. Darf. 2017. 198 pages.According to the potted bio that fills the first page of this slim volume (eighty-five pages of text, many heavy with footnotes, preceded by an introduction and an annota…
El Paso, Texas. Broken River Books. 2017. 143 pages.Chichén Itzá is a pyramid in Yucatan, Mexico, named partly for the people of Itzá who lived there. Like the ancient Mayans, to speak of Itzá…
London. Istros Books. 2017. 146 pages.In her slim novel Hair Everywhere, Croatian author Tea Tulić presents a compilation of interconnected, fragmentary prose poems that reflect how one young…
Belgrade. Laguna. 2017. 239 pages.Renowned, awarded, and translated Serbian writer Ljubica Arsić (b. 1955) often promotes domestic and foreign women authors from past and present times. This time she…
Cairo. Hoopoe / American University in Cairo Press. 2017. 155 pages.In the poignant and humorous prose of Gaza Weddings, Palestinian poet, novelist, critic, painter, and photographer Ibrahim…
Arles. Actes Sud. 2017. 150 pages.The Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, is awarded annually in early November. The 2017 winner broke precedent by hardly qualifying as a novel.…
Los Angeles. Unnamed Press. 2017. 266 pages.Malu Halasa’s debut novel, Mother of All Pigs, is entertaining, disturbing, and educational. The author of six nonfiction books covering Syria, Ira…
Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink. 2017. 271 pages.Populated by a pantheon of established and emerging African literary figures, The Goddess of Mtwara and Other Stories boasts an array of…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2017. 108 pages.The setting of Old Rendering Plant is the German Democratic Republic in which Wolfgang Hilbig grew up. In a veritable perversion of the convent…
Easthampton, Massachusetts. Small Beer Press. 400 pages.Su Wei currently teaches Chinese language and literature at Yale University, and The Invisible Valley is his first novel available in E…
New York. Atria. 2018. 224 pages.With over thirty foreign rights sales, this first novel has won the 2017 Strega, Strega Giovani, and the Prix Médicis étranger. Beyond its mountain setting and underst…
New York. New Directions. 2018. 128 pages.In her latest book, Yoko Tawada describes a dystopian Japan after an unspecified disaster: the ground is contaminated, food growth is limited to certain regio…
New York. Archipelago Books. 2018. 270 pages.The folkloric stories in Pearls on a Branch feature protagonists, often young women, who work to shape their future through generosity and clevern…
Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2018. 232 pages.Part family history, part lost love story, and mostly memoirish novel, Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s experiment with fragmented narrative augmented by illu…
Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2018. 375 pages.The eponymous farm at the heart of Héctor Abad’s new novel is tucked into a verdant corner of northwest Colombia. Known as La Oculta, it’s “a good hiding p…
London. Fitzcarraldo Editions. 2017. 400 pages. The five characters in Companions struggle with the trials and tribulations of middle age in the twenty-first century. Loneliness and isolat…
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London. Oneworld. 2017. 485 pages.“They know not what they do” is a plea for forgiveness, but in the context of this remarkable novel, the phrase takes on an unforgiving note. True, Jussi Valtonen wri…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2017. 312 pages.Celebrated Spanish novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina’s new novel, Like a Fading Shadow, is a detailed work with multiple narrative threads wov…
New York. Simon & Schuster. 2017. 132 pages.In this compact and evocative historical novel, a filmmaker flees from the scene of the twentieth century’s greatest crime, only to find his family enme…