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…
FICTION
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…
Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink Books. 2019. 240 pages. Praise for the Women of the Family is a character study of a Palestinian clan set after the 1967 war. Women in the novel are obj…
Dallas, Texas. Deep Vellum. 2019. 145 pages. The Algerian-born francophone writer Zahia Rahmani’s experimental prose poses a seemingly simple yet complex question: What does it mean to be a mig…
New York. Spuyten Duyvil. 2019. 224 pages. Maria Matios is an award-winning contemporary Ukrainian author, widely known for her authentic writing style. She is currently residing in Kyiv, the c…
Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2019. 197 pages. Rodrigo Rey Rosa might be the least well known of our greatest living writers. His books give us a cacophony of voices that, like the Sirens, tempt u…
New York. SJP for Hogarth. 2019. 162 pages. The revolution will be made into art. Selahattin Demirtaş is writing literature for its power to transform people and nations from within. He asserts…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2019. 262 pages. When one thinks of Argentine literature, particularly contemporary literature, Guillermo Saccomanno (b. 1948, Buenos Aires) does not come imme…
New York. Soho Press. 2019. 202 pages. Dark Constellations is a slim novel that takes on large questions about evolution (both biological and technological) and interspecies hybridization. S…