Marina Harss, tr. New York. Other Press. 2012. ISBN 9781590515112 Writer and filmmaker Cristina Comencini’s 2009 novel Quando la notte was a hit in Italy, as was her film based on the bo…
FICTION
- Paris. Gallimard. 2012. ISBN 9782070136186 Rewritings of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe have been numerous, especially among Caribbean writers. Robinson Crusoe presumably landed on the isl…
- New York. Ecco / HarperCollins. 2013. ISBN 9780062198792Rilla Askew’s fourth novel is a brilliant evocation of Heraclitus’s axiom that character is fate—an ironic evocation she both confirms and…
- Barcelona. Anagrama. 2011. ISBN 9788433972279Formas de volver a casa, Alejandro Zambra’s third novel, is the logical continuation of his two previous works: Bonsái (2006) and La…
- Anne McLean & Rosalind Harvey, tr. New York. New Directions. 2012. ISBN 9780811219617 Enrique Vila-Matas is a consistently rich and challenging contemporary Spanish-language novelist. Revered…
- Athens. Metaihmio. 2011. ISBN 9789605014940 Vasia Tzanakari’s first novel, Tzoni kai Loulou (Johnny and Loulou), is a love story set in contemporary Athens during a time of crisis, unemp…
- Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic. Olena Bormashenko, tr. Ursula K. Le Guin, intro. Chicago. Chicago Review Press. 2012. ISBN 9781613743416Geoff Dyer. Zona:…
- New York. Hogarth. 2012. ISBN 9780307955890At the beginning of The Watch, Nizam, a young woman from a mountain village in Afghanistan, arrives in a clearing outside a US outpost, using her ha…
- Lytton Smith, tr. Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2012. ISBN 9781934824351In the opening scene of Children in Reindeer Woods, Rafael and some fellow soldiers come across a farm. The soldier…
- Max Weiss, tr. Cairo. American University in Cairo Press (Oxford University Press, distr.). 2011. ISBN 9789774164804Set on the eve of the Iraq War, A Tunisian Tale reveals a westernized elite…
- Daniel Bowles, tr. Las Vegas, Nevada. AmazonCrossing. 2011. ISBN 9781611090574Vivian Atkinson, the eponymous protagonist of Thomas Meinecke’s 1998 novel, is the child of a German mother and an America…
- Francesco Leggio, tr. Rome. Edizioni e/o. 2011. ISBN 9788866320128World Literature Today readers have met Algerian-born novelist Amara Lakhous before and may recall the lead character in his…
- New York. Bloomsbury. 2012. ISBN 9781608198108When an astronaut who has experienced weightlessness returns to an almost empty home, afflicted by earth’s gravity, the reader can hardly be surprised tha…
- Thomas Lamarre & Kazuko Y. Behrens, tr. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press. 2012. ISBN 9780816654550Paris, 1948. In local cafés, surrealists “ruined by the war” gather regularly around vis…
- Helge Dascher, tr. Montréal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2012. ISBN 9781770460713Guy Delisle is comics’ travelographer du jour, a restless Quebecois whose thoughtful graphic narratives of ex…
- New York. Knopf. 2012. ISBN 9780307594167Since its release in May, Toni Morrison’s recent novel Home has been criticized for its brevity. With only 145 pages to boast, it departs from such mo…
- New York. Knopf. 2012. ISBN 9780307594167Toni Morrison’s tenth novel, Home, focuses on a Korean War veteran, Frank Money, and his sister Ycindra (Cee) Money, whom he leaves behind in Lotcus,…
- Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, tr. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2012. isbn 9780374119393 Andrés Neuman’s Traveler of the Century reflects Latin America’s “total novel,” bruta…
- Paris. Gallimard. 2011. ISBN 9782070134601Rue Darwin is Boualem Sansal’s fourth novel. His third, Le Village de l’Allemand (2008; Eng. The German Mujahid, 2009), re…
- Barcelona. Anagrama. 2011 (© 2010). ISBN 9788433972156We are so accustomed to the proliferation of the detective novel in Latin America that in the last few years we have barely noticed that many of t…
- Montréal. Lévesque. 2012. ISBN 9782923844824With a title that automatically evokes Franz Kafka’s unfinished first novel, Amerika provides a jarringly absurd version of the traditional immigra…
- Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverston, and Nathan Englander, tr. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2012. ISBN 978-0374533335 Some stories are hard to get out of your head, and Etgar Keret wri…
- New York. Random House. 2012. ISBN 978-0812992793The Orphan Master’s Son follows Jun Do, a man searching for identity while succumbing to the impulsive and oppressive whims of the North Korea…
- New York. Knopf. 2012. ISBN 9780307958310In his second novel, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, Mohammed Hanif explores the relationships among caste, gender, and religion in modern Pakistan through…
- New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2012. ISBN 9780374222642Nadine Gordimer’s latest novel adds to the growing body of literature expressing discontent with the social, economic, and political cond…