Paris. Editions Albin Michel. 2021. 240 pages.
“AH, LOOK AT all the lonely people!” The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” refrain captures the essence of Senegalese writer Fatou Diome’s…
FICTION
Albuquerque. University of New Mexico Press. 2021. 64 pages. TO ENTER SY HOAHWAH’S Ancestral Demon of a Grieving Bride is to immerse yourself in liminality and enter th…
Calgary. Freehand Books. 2021. 306 pages. JOHN GREYEYES “only wanted a coffee in the morning and a frying pan of beans and wieners at night,” but living on the reserve, “everyon…
New York. Flatiron Books. 2021. 336 pages. IN HER THIRD novel, L.A. Weather, María Amparo Escandón presents a well-to-do Los Angeles family in a transformational year. The b…
De Gordyk, The Netherlands. Bornmeer. 2021. 438 pages. IN TESTAMINT FAN DE SIEL (Testament of the soul), the eighty-five-year-old novelist Hylke Speerstra creates two c…
Singapore. Kitaab. 2020. 245 pages. THE BEST ASIAN Short Stories 2020 is a volume showcasing the vitality and range of contemporary Asian writers. The…
Handforth, UK. Honford Star. 2021. 294 pages. HORROR FILMS FROM East Asia (especially South Korea and Japan) have impacted the cinematic genre for decades and made big business throu…
New York. New Directions. 2021. 91 pages. HUNGARIAN AUTHOR László Krasznahorkai is gifted with seductive powers that force us to go wherever he goes; we simply cannot negate him. In…
Sheffield, UK. And Other Stories. 2021. 272 pages. THIS COLLECTION BRINGS together three superb novellas by Yuri Herrera that had been previously published separately in English…
New York. Common Era. 2020. 148 pages. CAN XUE’S Purple Perilla includes three short stories that immerse readers in a world where reality and absurdity collide. In “An…
New York. Penguin. 2021. 666 pages. “FIRSTLY THERE WAS no plot, and secondly there was no sequence of events, and no coherence, everything came at you higgledy-piggledy.” So Karl Ove…
Cairo. Hoopoe. 2021. 333 pages. IN HERE IS A BODY, Basma Abdel Aziz’s follow-up to her acclaimed, award-winning novel The Queue (WLT, Sept. 2016, 73), a co…
New York / London. Riverhead Books / Fitzcarraldo Editions. 2022. 992 pages. THE YEAR IS 1752 (the page, 900-or-so), and a carriage is barreling through misty Podolia, a histor…
Sheffield, UK. And Other Stories. 2020. 165 pages. THE NOVEL WRETCHEDNESS begins with a chance encounter between a cellist and a homeless young man in Malmö, Sweden. It…
Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2020. 291 pages. THE STORY OF A Single Swallow follows the lives of three men, two westerners and one Chinese, who became friends during World War…
Bloomington, Indiana. Autumn Hill Books. 2020. 113 pages. IT IS COMMON for Latin American writers to be introduced to readers of other languages with a short novel not fully ref…
New York. World Editions. 2021. 288 pages. SUMMER BROTHER, Dutch writer Jaap Robben’s International Booker Prize–longlisted novel, begins with a weighted query put to a…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2021. 128 pages. WILD SWANS, the second short-story collection by Danish author Dorthe Nors, makes its US debut with fourteen mini-tales, n…
New York. Bloomsbury. 2021. 152 pages. JUST HOW MUCH can change in a day? For Lucas Pereyra, a fortysomething Argentine writer stuck in a rut—in his work, his marriage, his life—the…
New York. Soft Skull Press. 2020. 288 pages. AOKO MATSUDA’S STORY cycle takes its title from the children’s story Where the Wild Things Are, the replacement of “Things” with…
Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2021. 204 pages. COMMITTED TO KEEPING Tunisian works available in Tunisia, Yamen Manai has hitherto published with Éditions Elyzad. Now, Amazon Crossing and…
New York. Archipelago Books. 2021. 275 pages. “I LIVE IN A basement; a result of having come down in the world, in every sense.” So begins “A Sudden Liberating Thought,” one of thirt…
New York. Seven Stories Press. 2021. 240 pages. IN HER NATIVE Croatia, Ivana Bodrožić is controversial. While internally displaced as a nine-year-old at the beginning of the civil wa…
Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2020. 264 pages. WITH EVERY SENTENCE in his new novel, Roy Jacobsen shows how his characters carve their morality out of the dried driftwood found on th…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2021. 376 pages. MANY OF SONALLAH IBRAHIM’S novels explore how former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s version of socialism was…