New York. Feminist Press. 2017. 136 pages.The Iliac Crest is a bizarre and mystifying gothic tale told from the perspective of a cynical and paranoid narrator, a doctor obsessed with the ocea…
FICTION
Paris. Flammarion. 2017. 880 pages.There’s something quirky, something darkly hilarious, about everything Grégoire Bouillier decides to set on the page. Not only are the scenarios he describes somethi…
London. Jantar. 2017. 129 pages.I wanted to like Balla’s In the Name of the Father, I really did. I was intrigued by the promise of a Slovak Kafka; I wanted to experience the Eastern European…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2017. 346 pages.Far too little is written about or by the Armenian peoples. Granted, the Republic of Armenia is a small country (population: 3 million),…
Berlin. Suhrkamp Verlag. 2017. 365 pages.The first sentence of Ausser sich (Beside yourself)—“Ich weiß nicht, wohin es geht, alle anderen wissen es, ich nicht” (I don’t know where we…
New York. Grove Press. 288 pages.A 743-page manuscript by a writer with the pen name of Bandi (“Firefly” in Korean) was reputedly smuggled out of North Korea and into China in 2013. The English public…
New York. New Directions. 2017. 351 pages.László Krasznahorkai’s latest book to be translated into English, The World Goes On, is one of the strangest books I’ve come across in quite some tim…
London. Old Street. 2017. 160 pages.Thirteen-year-old Auguste (Gus) Sutter vividly remembers the summer of 1976, not just for the preternaturally harsh drought but also for the incidents lea…
Vancouver. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2017. 300 pages.With an orchestra of players on the stage of the streets of Montreal, Julie Maroh conducts a symphony of the human condition in Body Music. Thro…
New York. Scribner. 2017. 438 pages.Readers have come to expect novels that experiment with form and structure from Jennifer Egan, but Manhattan Beach proves that expectations can be unmet in…
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Furari. Doddington, United Kingdom. Fanfare / Ponent Mon. 2017. 208 pages.Venice. Doddington, United Kingdom. Fanfare / Ponent Mon. 2017. 120 pages…
Stockholm. Albert Bonniers. 2017. 344 pages.Vera is a strange book: the darkly glittering wrapping of high romance conceals a bitter core, a compound of the collaborator’s secret shame and gu…
New York. New Directions. 2017. 378 pages.Belladonna’s title is a deadly plant; its Latin epigraph warns a society on a suicidal path: “Today it’s me, tomorrow . . . you. Who can escape?” Thi…
Paris. Gallimard. 2017. 223 pages.The Senegalese author Tidiane N’Diaye is known for such historical works as Le Génocide voilé (Gallimard, 2008) and Par-delà les ténèbres blanches (…
New York. Penguin Books. 2018. 288 pages.Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the first Iraqi novel to do so), Frankenstein in Baghdad is a dark, surreal tale of a creature b…
Berkeley, California. Counterpoint. 2018. 192 pages.Ismail Kadare is one of the most lauded writers-in-translation in the English language, certainly one of Europe’s most important writers, and virtua…
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New York. Bloomsbury USA. 2017. 384 pages.Istanbul and Oxford are over 1,600 miles apart, yet Turkish author Elif Shafak pulls them together in her tenth novel, Three Daughters of Eve. Shafak…
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Dallas. Deep Vellum. 2017. 300 pages.From the first pages of her new novel, Alisa Ganieva toys with the expectations of her readers. Her title, Bride and Groom, seems to promise a traditional…
New York. Harper. 2017. 266 pages.The war for earth is over; the earth lost. That, in a nutshell, is the opening situation in The Book of Joan. Some of the powerful have escaped to a sor…
Gurgaon, India. Penguin Books. 2017. 186 pages.Perumal Murugan is a contemporary Tamil author whose works mostly focus on the lives of the vulnerable and the disadvantaged. Current Show is hi…
Albany, California. Stone Bridge Press. 2017. 208 pages.Set during the American occupation of Okinawa, In the Woods of Memory centers on two events that send cracks running out in every direc…
Boston. Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2017. 259 pages.Young-Ha Kim’s I Hear Your Voice begins with a lens at once magical and perturbing as the reader glimpses the Express Bus Te…
Frankfurt am Main. S. Fischer. 2017. 139 pages.In Klaus Böldl’s latest novel, Der Atem der Vögel, the narrator, Philipp, came to the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic between Scotland and I…
Bloomington, Indiana. Slavica / Three String Books. 2017. 185 pages.The translators of Into the Spotlight have set out to expand the body of contemporary Slovak fiction available in English,…
New York. Arcade. 2017. 208 pages.The Hole, by Hye-young Pyun, one of South Korea’s most notable writers, embarks on an intriguing premise. What happens when a successful life is destroyed af…