Gibsons, British Columbia. Nightwood Editions. 2021. 224 pages.
EDMONTON HAD ANOTHER name for 118 Avenue, forgotten when the Albertan city shifted to a grid system; others call it the…
FICTION
Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 180 pages. IT’S HARD NOT to become hooked by Ida Jessen’s stubbornness; her refusal to tidy things up for us. This sixty-year-old Danish author harbors no…
New York. HarperVia. 2021. 208 pages. SOSUKE NATSUKAWA’S lighthearted fantasy is a simple tale about a talking cat who challenges a bereaved teenager in Japan to find self-confidence…
New York. Turtle Point Press. 2022. 173 pages. EDUARDO SÁNCHEZ RUGELES has had the misfortune of watching his country of origin, Venezuela, descend into an endless nightmare of politi…
Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2022. 447 pages. AT THE TOP of the tallest mountain in the country, two women hold each other tight. Auður, the widowed housewife, is a prodigious mountain w…
St. Louis. Dorothy Project. 2022. 280 pages. ENGLISH-LANGUAGE readers finally have the chance to enter into the beguiling, menacing, and strangely poignant world that one of Mexico’s…
Paris. Minuit. 2021. 140 pages. YVES RAVEY HAS been writing well-received novels and plays since 1989. His seventeenth novel demonstrates once again that he is one of the best living…
Barcelona. Alfaguara. 2021. 246 pages. PILAR QUINTANA HAS won the prestigious Alfaguara Novel Prize for 2021 with Los abismos (The abysses). This highly coveted literary reco…
Toronto. Rare Machines. 2022. 286 pages. THE AWARD-WINNING Chinese Canadian author Xue Yiwei’s novel Celia, Misoka, I tells a story of immigrants in this great, globalized ag…
Guangzhou. Flower Town Publishing. 2021. 306 pages. LIU ZHENYUN IS one of the more influential writers in contemporary Chinese literary circles. Along with Mo Yan, Yu Hua, and Su Tong…
Oakland, California. PM Press. 2021. 320 pages. NAZARÉ IS AN incantation, an allegory, and a prophecy. With imaginative and ornate linguistic skills, and a brutal naturalism…
New Delhi. Fourth Estate. 2021. 185 pages. IN HER FIRST collection of fiction, The House Next to the Factory, Sonal Kohli brings us very close to her characters. They are so…
London. Scribe. 2021. 323 pages. FROM THE FIRST PAGE of this beguilingly strange, darkly comic novel, we are plunged into a destabilized realm of fiction where the laws of rationality…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2021. 400 pages. MORE A PHANTASMAGORIC dreamscape than a straightforward narrative graphic novel, Night Bus contains eleven stories, the long…
Oakland, California. Transit. 2021. 157 pages. THE THEMES OF exile, immigration, and displacement have been recurrent in the literature of the Southern Cone since the region’s conflic…
Trocy-en-Multien, France. Éditions Conférence. 2020. 496 pages. ZÉRO AVANT JÉSUS-CHRIST is the second published book by French author Jean Chavot, following a collec…
New York. Doubleday. 2021. 288 pages. SILENT WINDS, DRY SEAS is one of the first novels by a Mauritian author to be originally published in the United States. Deeply imbued w…
Johannesburg. Picador Africa. 2021. 310 pages. THE VILLAGE THAT sleeps is South Africa in the afterlives of apartheid, thought-provokingly awoken by Sindiwe Magona’s unflinching indic…
New York. Hogarth. 2021. 304 pages. IN 2017, ANUK ARUDPRAGASAM, a virtual unknown in the literary world, beat a former Booker winner and other senior novelists to the DSC Prize for So…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2021. 240 pages. SONGS FOR THE FLAMES is Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s seventh book published in English and his second collection of short stories. The c…
Richmond, Virginia. Valancourt. 2022. 328 pages. I DESCRIBED VALANCOURT founders James Jenkins and Ryan Cagle’s first volume of The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories as…
Paris. Editions Albin Michel. 2021. 240 pages. “AH, LOOK AT all the lonely people!” The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” refrain captures the essence of Senegalese writer Fatou Diome’s 2021 s…
Albuquerque. University of New Mexico Press. 2021. 64 pages. TO ENTER SY HOAHWAH’S Ancestral Demon of a Grieving Bride is to immerse yourself in liminality and enter the poet…
Calgary. Freehand Books. 2021. 306 pages. JOHN GREYEYES “only wanted a coffee in the morning and a frying pan of beans and wieners at night,” but living on the reserve, “everyone felt…
New York. Flatiron Books. 2021. 336 pages. IN HER THIRD novel, L.A. Weather, María Amparo Escandón presents a well-to-do Los Angeles family in a transformational year. The bo…