New York. New Directions. 2019. 576 pages.
It is revealing to consider why this book fails so spectacularly—especially given the sustained astonishment László Krasznahorkai’s previous novels ev…
FICTION
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 336 pages. The narrator of Tash Aw’s latest novel, We, the Survivors, is an ethnically Hokkien Chinese Malaysian man called Lee Hock Lye—know…
Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2019. 428 pages. Adam Dannoun, a melancholic Palestinian self-exiled in New York and the protagonist-narrator of Children of the Ghetto, suffers f…
Pasadena, California. Red Hen Press. 2019. 272 pages. The island, from a distance, looks like almost anything other than what it actually is: a place where the world’s detritus washes up, a place whe…
New York. Tor. 2019. 272 pages. Sometimes readers just can’t let go. They are so in love with a character, a story cycle, or a fictional world that when the original author moves on to other books (o…
Melbourne. Scribe. 2019. 345 pages. In a note at the beginning of Among the Lost, Emiliano Monge thanks the human rights organizations that provided him with inspiration. Throughout th…
Noida, U.P. Simon & Schuster India. 2019. 322 pages. In her latest novel, I Have Become the Tide, Indian author Githa Hariharan reminds the world that caste exists, despite many of her c…
New York. Europa Editions. 2019. 170 pages. In Ann Goldstein’s wonderful translation of Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s The Girl Returned, the first image we have of the protagonist is of…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 546 pages. Jacob’s Ladder is an ambitious family saga that encompasses six generations and alternates between two plotlines. The book describ…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 320 pages. Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, Gun Island, traces familiar crosscultural patterns evident in his earlier novels. There are journeys…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2019. 448 pages. Maaza Mengiste’s latest novel, The Shadow King, not only adds to the current outpouring of contemporary African women writers, it also…
London. Linen Press. 2019. 302 pages. Mona Dash’s debut memoir, A Roll of the Dice, is an odyssey of an invincible mother who, despite her best efforts, loses her firstborn son…
Paris. Pierre-Guillaume de Roux. 2019. 302 pages. After a novel written in English, The Pleasures of Queuing (2018), Erik Martiny has produced a French-language novel that is somewhat s…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 240 pages. Commencing Leaving the Atocha Station with a sharp gesture, novelist Ben Lerner puts all his narrative and descriptive responsibili…
New York. Catapult. 2019. 224 pages. One doesn’t have to see the carved face of the Grand Canyon to know water is powerful and mysterious but also beautiful. It is this combination of danger an…
New York. Other Press. 2019. 336 pages. In his wry but uneven second novel, Joost de Vries kills off his most interesting character almost immediately. Josip Brik—famed historian and “generalis…
South Pasadena, California. Semiotext(e). 2018. 240 pages. Heike Geissler would like to be “a person who is what she does,” but her writing and translating work pays too little to buy the occasional…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2019. 240 pages. Following up on her 2014 novel Fever Dream (nominated for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize), Samanta Schweblin’s collection of short storie…
London. Peirene Press. 2019. 148 pages. Picture a Russian cave two hundred years ago. Myths persist that it holds “a small tribe of forest dwellers.” Into this uncharted territory marches an e…
New York. Black Lawrence Press. 2019. 152 pages. The title in Jacob Appel’s fifth collection of stories certainly echoes a thought Philip Roth articulated in the tumultuous 1960s: he worried th…
Quito, Ecuador. Libresa. 2018. 254 pages. This roller coaster of a “biofiction” is a report to an academy that is more Bolañesque and an escape from institutionalized literary constraints than a Kafk…
London. Istros Books. 2019. 189 pages. A cult figure when Dogs appeared in Serbia in 1980, dead at forty-three in 1996, Biljana Jovanović today commands widespread respect. Yet Dogs…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 527 pages. In 2001’s Reality Hunger, David Shields mashed together quotes in a collage manifesto that praised antinarrative tendencies, antigenre h…
New York. New Directions. 2019. 161 pages. The Fox and Dr. Shimamura feels like a miniature voyage around the world and into the not-so-distant past. We travel with Dr. Shimamura from the ru…
New York. Tor Books. 2019. 352 pages. If you’ve read Ken Liu’s recent anthologies of Chinese science fiction in translation (Invisible Planets, 2018, and Broken Stars, 2019), then y…