New York. Other Press. 2024. 352 pages.
In the antiquated European tradition of Orientalist painting, the depiction of a sultan with a chained, dead, or sleeping tiger is a recurring…
FICTION
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024. 544 pages. The year 2026 is a tough time for forty-nine-year-old Paul Raison. As a high-ranking official in France’s Ministry of Finance, he…
New York. Penguin Press. 2024. 512 pages. The Third Realm, the third installment in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new fiction series, is a dark mirror of the first volume of the cycle, The M…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2024. 464 pages. After a three-year wait, Sally Rooney’s fourth novel does not continue to explore female protagonists’ emotional struggles…
New York. Hogarth. 2024. 384 pages. Chigozie Obioma’s third novel, The Road to the Country, is a tense, evocative novel of the Biafran War (1967–70). Situated in the tradition of wor…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2024. 320 pages. The Empusium, by the acclaimed Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a departure from her usual w…
New York. Hogarth. 2025. 272 pages. Han Kang, the 2024 Nobel laureate, is still overcome by the violence that laces Korea’s warring past. Her compelling writing attempts to resuscita…
Bloomington, Indiana. Slavica. 2024. 71 pages. From the late nineteenth century onward, cotton became Central Asia’s predominant cash crop. To sustain the fields and fields of this “…
London. Tilted Axis Press. 2024. 107 pages. To Hell with Poets fits squarely within Kazakhstan’s rural narratology. And like other countries with a strong pastoral background (or, in…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2024. 120 pages. A leaf’s rustling. Branches mingling. In the distance, lightning strikes. Whispers. A felled log. A milkless breast. Dogs. Generation…
New York. Random House. 2024. 286 pages. Téa Obreht’s great new novel is, in fact, a book about war refugees. However, told in first person and set up in the near future in a city th…
Halifax. Nimbus. 2024. 272 pages. You could read her memoir for the fifty-pounds-of-carrots story—the bag Lorri Neilsen Glenn bought, in an empty lot near the highway, for six…
London. Dar Arab. 2024. 484 pages. “Mecca. The Sacred Mosque . . . Before that moment, everything had been fine.” Thus opens the novel Lost in Mecca, a title paradoxical in it…
New York. HarperCollins. 2024. 176 pages. This slim and slow novel is the sequel to Japanese writer Satoshi Yagisawa’s award-winning debut, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. In Ya…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2024. 176 pages. Liminality is a term used in anthropology to describe the quandary mode being experienced by humans during the middle stage of a rite of pass…
Fort Smith, Arkansas. Belle Point Press. 2024. 160 pages. It’s been thirty-two years, five novels, and an essay collection since Rilla Askew published Strange Business, her debut sho…
Belgrade. LOM. 2023. 159 pages. Brutal, ruthless, cruel—this is life in the Belgrade neighborhood of Dorćol that Serbian writer Maja Iskra recounts in Aperkat (Uppercut), her critica…
New York. Scribner. 2024. 304 pages. Colm Tóibín—twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, winner of the International Dublin Literary Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and the Folio Prize…
New York. Ballantine. 2023. 352 pages. Born at dawn in a nondescript Portland hospital, Elspeth Noura “Betty” Rummani, the protagonist in Sarah Cypher’s debut novel, The Skin and Its…
New York. Europa Editions. 2024. 391 pages. The demographic landscape of Europe is changing. With an increasing migrant population, what constitutes a “national” body is also changin…
New York. Liveright. 2024. 272 pages. This novel-memoir traces the rise of Ukrainian nationalism through the lens of one of its most fervent supporters, Viacheslav Lypynskyi (1882–19…
New York. Scribe. 2024. 279 pages. In Juja, one thread holds together many women’s stories: a short book written in 1953, Ice Age, by a mysterious author in Paris, Saré, that seems t…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2024. 198 pages. How to write a novel about art? If anything, the novel risks reducing art to the experience of the protagonist, the artist. Whil…
New York. Knopf. 2024. 496 pages. From first page to last, this novel is colored by the water sign. It begins with a raindrop and ends with a flood. Any drop of water at all holds th…
New York. Pantheon Books. 2024. 308 pages. Iranian American authors are often called upon to represent their culture and people against a steady stream of unpleasant news headlines a…