Belgrade, Serbia. Cadmus Press. 2018. 246 pages.
Tanja Maljartschuk’s A Biography of a Chance Miracle is a deceptively complex take on post-Soviet Ukrainian culture. Maljartschuk, known in U…
FICTION
New York. New Directions. 2018. 122 pages. At ninety-one, revered Mexican writer Amparo Dávila has had a long and illustrious life in letters. Born in Zacatecas in 1928, she went to the nation’s capi…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2018. 373 pages. Nuruddin Farah’s latest novel, North of Dawn, is a book that epitomizes the existential crisis of the twenty-first century. It is a novel t…
New York. Pantheon. 2019. 320 pages. The Other Americans is Laila Lalami’s fourth full-length novel. Whereas her previous novels featured stories that unfolded at least partially in Mo…
New York. Knopf. 2018. 304 pages. Although the principal setting is 2017, the first part of Anne Tyler’s Clock Dance is divided into particular years—1967, 1977, 1997—each corresponding to a…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2018. 280 pages. In Kim Sagwa’s English-language debut, the pressures of being a teenage girl take two friends down a dark, twisted path within the competitive world o…
Cairo. American University in Cairo Press. 2018. 216 pages. It’s no accident that the epigraph to this novel is from Nikos Kazantzakis’s Report to Greco: “I said to the almond tree, ‘Speak t…
Austin, Texas. A Strange Object. 2018. 236 pages. “Quirky and amazing” are the persistent words one might utter after reading each of the seventeen stories in Rita Bullwinkel’s debut collection, …
İstanbul. Heyamola. 2018. 88 pages. In this playful and provocatively ironic book, Fırat Caner makes his readers suspect the foundations of alleged truths and provides a critique of cultural an…
Cologne, Germany. Eichborn Verlag. 2018. 428 pages. How does someone turn into the person they don’t want to be? Franziska Hauser answers this question in her autofictional book, Die Gewitterschw…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2018. 211 pages. The reservoir of material for comedy, either stand-up or on the page, is often autobiographical, and this is certainly the case for Aline Kominsky-Cr…
El Paso, Texas. Cinco Puntos Press. 2018. 208 pages. Weaving together the voices of Lucia and Magdalena, two Maya women friends, Christine Eber, like the backstrap-loom weavers in the novel, exquisit…
London. Pushkin Press. 2018. Playwright and novelist Toshiki Okada (b. 1973) offers two uncomfortable vignettes of young people adrift in a world apparently without safe harbor in The End of the…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 195 pages. Our hero, the no-longer-young Swiss director Emil Nägeli, with thus far one cutting-edge film to his credit, finds himself, his natively sober ju…
Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf Press. 2018. 284 pages. This Mournable Body continues the narrative of Tambudzai, the protagonist from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s critically acclaimed novel Ne…
Barcelona. Literatura Random House. 2018. 137 pages. Depending on who keeps count and what his various publishers do, Prins is César Aira’s 101st book and 71st novel, and by the time this re…
New York. Other Press. 2019. 199 pages. This is a first novel, written by a very young author. The French original appeared in 2016 when Sarah Léon was barely twenty-one years old. Part of the charm…
London. Sceptre Books. 2018. 517 pages. Icelandic author Sjón’s masterful tome CoDex 1962 is now available in English translation—and this is cause to celebrate. The work is in three parts,…
Montreal. Baraka Books. 2018. 96 pages. Yannis Tsirbas’s Vic City Express, which was previously shortlisted for the Greek National Literature Award in 2013, is a small book that throws a ver…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 345 pages. Heroism in journalism seems to be one of the major themes of our time, and by almost any standard, Roberto Saviano is one of the most heroi…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2018. 240 pages. It would do a disservice to Children of God to say it merely focuses on something as clichéd and simplistic as light versus dark, yet at the sam…
New York. Europa Editions. 2018. 128 pages. The orange in the title of Iwaki Kei’s stunning debut novel, Farewell, My Orange, does not refer to the citrus fruit. It is the brilliant color of…
London. Pushkin Press. 2017. 416 pages. Reading Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen’s novel Secret Passages in a Hillside Town is like wandering a dreamlike labyrinth. The book garnered the 2011…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 144 pages. Early in Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, the narrator, a smart seventeen-year-old named Silvie, recalls accompanying her father to a history mu…
London. Norvik Press (Ingram, distr.). 2018. 241 pages. Estonian is a language that does not translate well to English. An approximate hybrid of Finnish and Russian, Estonian sentence structure…