New York. Riverhead Books. 2020. 248 pages.
THE DEATH OF VIVEK OJI breaks the reader’s heart at every turn. Knowing Vivek dies before one even opens the book, the reade…
FICTION
Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2021. 136 pages. IN MARÍA OSPINA’S first book of short fiction, Variations on the Body, each story lets the reader into the life of a differ…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2021. 183 pages. THE MIND RECEDES, reality remains—and writing. This is the landscape wherein Second Place, the new novel of Rachel Cusk…
New York. Knopf. 2021. 176 pages. WHEREABOUTS is Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel written in Italian and translated into English by herself. It is also her first novel since …
New York. Knopf. 2021. 256 pages. FIRST PERSON SINGULAR, a surprisingly poignant collection of eight short stories by Haruki Murakami (b. 1949), feels like an old…
Manchester. Comma Press. 2021. 112 pages. THE BOOK OF RAMALLAH brings together ten short stories to deliver a stunning and evocative portrait of this thriving city in P…
Toronto. Coach House Books. 2020. 166 pages. WHEN READERS MEET The Imago Stage’s narrator, she has been offline so long that she’s “starting to suffocate.” Her solution…
Hyderabad. Eka. 2020. 250 pages. IN ESTUARY, HIS LATEST NOVEL in English translation, Tamil writer Perumal Murugan depicts the predicament of the generation gap between pare…
New York. Overlook Press. 2020. 391 pages. LARS MYTTING’S Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way became an international best-seller s…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2020. 228 pages. NORI TAKES PLACE IN 1986 in the suburbs of Osaka, and it follows the daily adventures of a young girl named Noriko, or…
New York. Ballantine Books. 2020. 274 pages. FRANCES CHA, A FORMER travel and culture reporter for CNN in Seoul, aims to engross in her debut novel If I Had Your Face, a des…
McLean, Illinois. Dalkey Archive Press. 2020. ROSSANA CAMPO (b. 1963) burst on the Italian literary scene in 1992 with a picaresque novel about underwear: her own. A…
New York. Atria Books. 2020. 384 pages. SUSAN ABULHAWA TITLES her latest work with the words of James Baldwin. One book at a time, she continues to personify the Palestinian story in…
Barcelona. Editorial Anagrama. 2020. 421 pages. ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA—who frequently expounds on why the Great Latin American Novel will be distinguished by its poeticity and keeps garner…
New York. Other Press. 2021. 128 pages. IN A RECENT INTERVIEW in La Vanguardia, Catalan author Sergi Pàmies remarks that “we are fiction and reality at the same time.” Accor…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 160 pages. IN THE BLOOD-MIRED trenches of World War I, an unwilling soldier ascends to an agent of death. Though David Diop anchors At…
Portland. Tin House. 2021. 180 pages. WHEN SHE GOES TO SCHOOL , which isn’t often, the seven-year-old protagonist of this terrific novel is reminded that she has atypical interests.…
Edinburgh. Charco Press. 2021. 174 pages. IN THE AFTERWORD TO A Perfect Cemetery, translator Jennifer Croft contemplates the crucial translation challenge of rendering the r…
Kolkata. Seagull Books. 2021. 312 pages. WHAT IS CHESS if not a metaphorical microcosm of a myriad of human institutions, conflicts, and systems? In Chess with My Grandfather,…
New York. Pantheon Books. 2021. 304 pages. AT FIRST IT APPEARS that Morningside Heights is yet another campus tale of the professor-meets-grad-student variety, but Joshua He…
New York. Tor Books. 2020. 336 pages. CIXIN LIU likes to think big. Macromolecules, vast time spans, galaxies, and universes: these are just some of the materials Liu plays with…
Cairo. Hoopoe Press. 2021. 401 pages. THE ARABIC READER IS witnessing an evolution in the Arabic novel, particularly in the past decade and in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.…
New York. Verso. 2020. 196 pages. FOR HER SPLENDID Will and Testament (2019), Vigdis Hjorth allegedly based her narrative on family history (WLT, Spring 2020, 100).…
New York. Seven Stories Press. 2021. 48 pages. “ONCE UPON A TIME there was a man who worked very hard and very quickly, and who had left his soul far behind him long ago . …
New York. Random House. 2021. 384 pages. HOW BEAUTIFUL WE WERE is Imbolo Mbue’s second novel to be published; however, Mbue started writing it long before her first nov…