Paris. Albin Michel. 2012. ISBN 9782226242969Feminist revisionist mythmaking has often seized on the legend of Bluebeard, supposedly inspired by the fifteenth-century Breton serial killer Gilles…
FICTION
- John Fletcher, tr. London. MacLehose Press. 2012. ISBN 9780857050564 With Three Strong Women, Marie NDiaye became the first black woman to win the Prix Goncourt. This intri…
- Noha Radwan, tr. Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink. 2012. ISBN 9781566568821Shagara, a minor employee in the shipyards of Alexandria and the first-person narrator of The House of Jasmine—…
- Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2012. ISBN 9781555976118Shehan Karunatilaka’s first novel brilliantly exemplifies the best capacity of contemporary literature to make the stuff of local lives absolutely…
- Artarmon, New South Wales / Marietta, Georgia. Giramondo / Top Shelf. 2012. ISBN 9781603091534 The Australian comics scene has historically been a parenthetical description added to anglopho…
- Diego Trelles Paz, ed. Janet Hendrickson, tr. Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2012. ISBN 9781934824641 The Future Is Not Ours compiles twenty-three stories from fifteen Latin American…
- Hornsea, England. PS Publishing. 2012. ISBN 9781848634541Synth is a drug, able to induce full sensory hallucinations indistinguishable from reality. But Synth is new, of uncertain provenance, its…
- Marina Harss, tr. New York. Other Press. 2012. ISBN 9781590515112 Writer and filmmaker Cristina Comencini’s 2009 novel Quando la notte was a hit in Italy, as was her film based on the bo…
- Paris. Gallimard. 2012. ISBN 9782070136186 Rewritings of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe have been numerous, especially among Caribbean writers. Robinson Crusoe presumably landed on the isl…
- New York. Ecco / HarperCollins. 2013. ISBN 9780062198792Rilla Askew’s fourth novel is a brilliant evocation of Heraclitus’s axiom that character is fate—an ironic evocation she both confirms and…
- Barcelona. Anagrama. 2011. ISBN 9788433972279Formas de volver a casa, Alejandro Zambra’s third novel, is the logical continuation of his two previous works: Bonsái (2006) and La…
- Anne McLean & Rosalind Harvey, tr. New York. New Directions. 2012. ISBN 9780811219617 Enrique Vila-Matas is a consistently rich and challenging contemporary Spanish-language novelist. Revered…
- Athens. Metaihmio. 2011. ISBN 9789605014940 Vasia Tzanakari’s first novel, Tzoni kai Loulou (Johnny and Loulou), is a love story set in contemporary Athens during a time of crisis, unemp…
- Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic. Olena Bormashenko, tr. Ursula K. Le Guin, intro. Chicago. Chicago Review Press. 2012. ISBN 9781613743416Geoff Dyer. Zona:…
- New York. Hogarth. 2012. ISBN 9780307955890At the beginning of The Watch, Nizam, a young woman from a mountain village in Afghanistan, arrives in a clearing outside a US outpost, using her ha…
- Lytton Smith, tr. Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2012. ISBN 9781934824351In the opening scene of Children in Reindeer Woods, Rafael and some fellow soldiers come across a farm. The soldier…
- Max Weiss, tr. Cairo. American University in Cairo Press (Oxford University Press, distr.). 2011. ISBN 9789774164804Set on the eve of the Iraq War, A Tunisian Tale reveals a westernized elite…
- Daniel Bowles, tr. Las Vegas, Nevada. AmazonCrossing. 2011. ISBN 9781611090574Vivian Atkinson, the eponymous protagonist of Thomas Meinecke’s 1998 novel, is the child of a German mother and an America…
- Francesco Leggio, tr. Rome. Edizioni e/o. 2011. ISBN 9788866320128World Literature Today readers have met Algerian-born novelist Amara Lakhous before and may recall the lead character in his…
- New York. Bloomsbury. 2012. ISBN 9781608198108When an astronaut who has experienced weightlessness returns to an almost empty home, afflicted by earth’s gravity, the reader can hardly be surprised tha…
- Thomas Lamarre & Kazuko Y. Behrens, tr. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press. 2012. ISBN 9780816654550Paris, 1948. In local cafés, surrealists “ruined by the war” gather regularly around vis…
- Helge Dascher, tr. Montréal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2012. ISBN 9781770460713Guy Delisle is comics’ travelographer du jour, a restless Quebecois whose thoughtful graphic narratives of ex…
- New York. Knopf. 2012. ISBN 9780307594167Since its release in May, Toni Morrison’s recent novel Home has been criticized for its brevity. With only 145 pages to boast, it departs from such mo…
- New York. Knopf. 2012. ISBN 9780307594167Toni Morrison’s tenth novel, Home, focuses on a Korean War veteran, Frank Money, and his sister Ycindra (Cee) Money, whom he leaves behind in Lotcus,…
- Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, tr. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2012. isbn 9780374119393 Andrés Neuman’s Traveler of the Century reflects Latin America’s “total novel,” bruta…