Windsor, Canada. Biblioasis. 2017. 331 pages.Crime novels are commonly praised as “page-turners,” but there is a different kind of excellence in which each page invites savoring. To hurry through such…
FICTION
Paris. Don Quichotte éditions. 2017. 166 pages.With En compagnie des hommes, Véronique Tadjo brings the 2014–2016 Ebola crisis into sharp focus, reminding us that it is still very much a thre…
New York. New York Review Books Classics. 2017. 235 pages.Katalin Street is the third Magda Szabó novel to be published by New York Review Books Classics. Szabó, who died in 2007, was a Hunga…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2017. 256 pages.Elvira Navarro’s latest novel hinges largely on two questions: How do we know we’re being told the truth, and how does that lack of certainty influence…
New York. The Mantle. 2017. 280 pages.Winner of the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature, this deceptively simple and straightforward novel of day-to-day life in the small village of Ivona in western Ke…
New York. Other Press. 2017. 160 pages.Which life makes us happy? And what are we to do once we realize that the life we lead does not? With To the Back of Beyond, Swiss author Peter Stamm ha…
Brooklyn. Akashic Books. 2017. 158 pages.Achy Obejas’s new book, The Tower of the Antilles, amply fulfills the promise of the author’s earlier work. These stories are about borders—physical a…
San Francisco. City Lights. 2017. 128 pages.Contemporary Turkish writer and journalist Aslı Erdoğan’s new short-story collection, The Stone Building and Other Places, which won the prestigiou…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2017. 272 pages.Dogs at the Perimeter is the second novel by Madeleine Thien. Her first novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Bo…
New York. Knopf. 2017. 227 pages.Men without Women comprises seven short stories, four of which have appeared in other publications. All display elements of Haruki Murakami’s fiction that rea…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2017. 320 pages.Korean author Bae Suah’s latest writing, although a collection of short stories, is equally as experimental, cutting-edge, and captivating as her nove…
New York. Knopf. 2017. 449 pages.Many reviews of Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness have discussed its engagement with the larger political history of India’s last two decades a…
New York. The New Press. 2017. 199 pages.A beautiful amalgam of childlike optimism and the harshness of reality, Alain Mabanckou’s Black Moses solidifies the author’s status as a modern maste…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2017. 248 pages.Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short-story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, reveals a new herald for the New Weird, marking Machado as one of…
Belgrade, Serbia. Cadmus Press. 2016. 608 pages.Around the world, in over twenty-three countries and twenty languages, readers have long delighted in the works of visionary Serbian fantasist Zoran Živ…
Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press. 2017. 240 pages.Surrealist art, post-Christian dogma, reincarnation, and spaceships fueled by human consciousness: these are just some of the elements that…
New York. Penguin Books. 2017. 312 pages.A commune-turned-cult cut off from the rest of the world is undone from the inside by one little girl and a woman’s capacity for violence.Green has known no li…
New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 2017. 333 pages.Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War, envisions a twenty-first-century United States that has been literally and figuratively reshaped by such…
Boston. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2017. 312 pages.For a debut novel, Salt Houses is a sophisticated one with an interesting plot and well-developed characters. It deals with one of the world…
Sweden. l’Aleph. 2017. 112 pages.Vis & I is a love story but also, or even more so, a story of soul searching. An allusion to Vis & Ramin, an eleventh-century Persian epic lo…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2017. 528 pages.This rich and brilliant evocation of Jewish history will only burnish the already extraordinary reputation of the author of the acclaimed The M…
New York. Europa Editions. 2017. 150 pages.Domenico Starnone is the author of more than a dozen literary works of fiction in his native Italy, and thanks to Europa Editions in the United States, we ar…
Sacramento, California. Snuggly Books. 2017. 164 pages.Prolific Welsh author Rhys Hughes is thoroughly wrung out. While Wales is not quite the wettest place on earth, it sure comes close. In his lates…
London. Tilted Axis Press. 2017. 189 pages.A schoolgirl struggling to see why one plus one equals two; a bus passenger writing with unusually large gaps between sentences; a young couple being too for…
Madrid. Alfaguara. 2017. 216 pages.Ray Loriga, born Jorge Loriga Torrenova in Madrid in 1967, has garnered the 2017 Alfaguara Novel Prize for Rendición (Surrender), an engaging, thought-provo…