Paul Warham, tr. New York. Columbia University Press. 2015. ISBN 9780231171168.Nagasaki’s historical significance as a locus of Christianity in Japan and as the site of the second atomic bombing on Au…
FICTION
Paris. Éditions du Seuil. 2014. ISBN 9782021116199 In the fall of 2014, Lydie Salvayre’s novel Pas pleurer (Don’t cry) received the Prix Goncourt, winning in a field that included K…
Ari Larissa Heinrich, tr. New York. New York Review Books. 2014. ISBN 9781590177259.One cannot be qualified to make a specialist judgment on a work and also have no preconceptions about it. To be…
London / New York. And Other Stories. 2015. ISBN 9781908276445The Alphabet of Birds is a collection of seven short stories: four of them stand-alone narratives and the other three somewhat re…
Barcelona. Seix Barral. 2014. ISBN 9788432224157 In his ambitious new book, the Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina recounts two brief visits to Lisbon. One was his own, in the 1980s, researchin…
Ken Liu, tr. New York. Tor Books. 2014. ISBN 9780765377067In its opening pages, The Three-Body Problem plunges us into the Cultural Revolution. It is 1967. Ye Zhetai, a professor of theoretic…
Paris. Sabine Wespieser Éditeur. 2014. ISBN 9782848051178Yanick Lahens’s Bain de lune chronicles the history of a family in rural Haiti over four-plus generations. Tertulian Mésidor’s ar…
New York. Hogarth. 2015. ISBN 9780553418521Our imagination “takes what it knows from one set of experiences and sinks them into another to create some semblance of truth, bridge time.” This is ex…
Arabella Spencer, tr. New York. New Vessel Press. 2014. ISBN 9781939931139 In an interview about her most recent novel, Ukrainian-born German-language author Marjana Gaponenko explained her autho…
Ian Barnett, tr. London. And Other Stories. 2015. ISBN 9781908276506Argentine political history is replete with truths stranger than most fictions. From the almost-religious populism of Perón, to…
Paris. Gallimard. 2015. ISBN 9782070147557Gaston-Paul Effa, of Cameroonian origin, has lived for many years in France, where he teaches philosophy. He has published more than ten books, several on att…
Marilyn Booth, tr. San Francisco. City Lights Books. 2014. ISBN 9780872866232Hassan Daoud, a prominent Lebanese short-story writer and novelist, was born in 1950 in southern Lebanon and moved as a chi…- Calvin McMillin, ed. Honolulu. University of Hawai`i Press. 2015. ISBN 9780824838928As Calvin McMillin notes, and as longtime readers of Frank Chin’s work will realize, The Confessions of a Number…
Jonathan Reeder, tr. New York. Hogarth. 2014. ISBN 9780553417852Do we control our fate or do the fates control us? That is the question that Dutch author Peter Buwalda examines in his entertaining nov…
Toronto. Coach House Books. 2015. ISBN 9781552453056Canadian writer André Alexis invents a modern Greek mythology in his 2015 novel Fifteen Dogs, bringing together prose and poetry, cons…
Toronto / Berkeley, California. Random House Canada / Soft Skull Press. 2014. ISBN 9780307356345 / 9781593766139In her second novel, Padma Viswanathan takes on a difficult subject—the 1985 bombing of…
Tess Lewis, tr. London. Haus (University of Chicago Press, distr.). 2014. ISBN 9781908323491For a writer born in Israel, living in Austria, and writing in German, it is not surprising that themes such…
Tiina Nunnally, tr. London. Serpent’s Tail. 2015. ISBN 9781781254882I’m seldom sad to have finished a book. The Winter War is one of those rare novels that leave you wishing there c…
Mayra Santos-Febres, ed. Mexico City. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 2014. ISBN 9786070252914Since 2009, the National Autonomous University in Mexico has been publishing the series Sólo…
Istanbul. Yapı Kredi Yayınları. 2014. ISBN 9789750830884 Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s ninth novel, Kafamda Bir Tuhaflık (A Strangeness in My Mind, forthcoming in En…
Tess Lewis, tr. London. Seagull Books / University of Chicago Press. 2015. ISBN 9780857422125As this autobiographical bildungsroman, winner of the Swiss and German Book Awards in 2010, traces the…
Anne Mathai & Marie-Louise Naville, tr. New York. Europa Editions. 2014. ISBN 9781609452278A multinational corporation controls much of Asia, Muslim insurgents are battling occupiers from the…
New York. Random House. 2014. ISBN 981400065677 The Bone Clocks initially seems more conventional than Cloud Atlas—in short, a real novel. It begins in the mid-1980s and mo…
Stephen Snyder, tr. New York. Mulholland Books / Little, Brown. 2014. ISBN 9780316200929Confessions, the debut novel from Minato Kanae (b. 1973), is a sobering indictment of current Japanese…
Zoltán Hafner, ed. Budapest. Magvető. 2014. ISBN 9789631427738The Nobel Prize–winning writer Imre Kertész always focused his writing on two broad themes: the Holocaust and his own experience of post-H…