Bloomington, Indiana. Slavica Publishers. 2020. 265 pages.
“PLEASE, YOU CAN’T look at everything through the lens of politics.” Such is the impassioned plea from our…
FICTION
Cheshire. Honford Star. 2021. 176 pages. THIS PANDEMIC YEAR has felt like a dystopia to many of us—we were told to stay away from family and friends, urged to remain inside our homes,…
New York. Knopf. 2021. 288 pages. DEVOTED READERS OF the wondrously gifted sixty-six-year-old Israeli author David Grossman eventually fall hopelessly in love with him. There is a mag…
Evanston, Illinois. Curbstone Books. 2021. 133 pages. BENEATH ITS BUSTLING marketplace and wondrous architecture, Fez, Morocco, is no less susceptible to hatred. Tahar Ben Jelloun’s g…
Austin. University of Texas Press. 2020. 232 pages. THE WIND TRAVELER is the latest novel to appear in English by Alonso Cueto, an author known for his Redención tri…
New York. HarperCollins. 2021. 356 pages. WE KNOW YOU REMEMBER is the second novel by Swedish writer Tove Alsterdal to be translated into English. Three other novels have bee…
Dallas. Deep Vellum. 2021. 168 pages. IT IS ALWAYS cause for excitement and anticipation when a foreign writer is translated, into any language, but especially into English, where the…
New York. New Directions. 2021. 96 pages. ARGENTINE LITERARY GIANT César Aira chronicles a series of absurd and magical coincidences in this slim novel, whose disjointed narrative sli…
New York. Other Press. 2021. 176 pages. A SINGER, NOVELIST, and activist of progressive, secular renown, Zülfü Livaneli returns to anglophone readers with a slim narrative, polished i…
New York. New Directions. 2021. 96 pages. TO CLASSIFY ANNE CARSON’S version of Euripides’ play The Trojan Women as a translation is to use the term lightly, for, in collabora…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2021. 402 pages. IN DISCUSSIONS OF writers considered to be pushing the limits of the traditional detective story, the works of Cuban writer Leona…
Sheffield, UK. Tilted Axis Press. 2020. 220 pages. YAN GE’S Strange Beasts of China immerses you in its world through a series of interconnected tales, each one focusing on a…
Middleton, Connecticut. Wesleyan University Press. 2020. 354 pages. THE PREFACE OF Satie on the Seine announces fifty letters written by Basile Hudon Beaulieu from Paris, Fra…
New York. Penguin. 2020. 407 pages. PHIL KLAY’S COLLECTION of short stories, Redeployment (2014), dealt with the Iraq War, sometimes directly, sometimes as remembered or rela…
New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2021. 272 pages. IN AN ERA WHEN alienation and anomie are daily topics, Will McPhail’s graphic novel In. will resonate with many readers.…
New York. Seagull Books. 2020. 344 pages. A LAND LIKE YOU follows Egypt from 1918 to 1952, as Western commodity capitalism, wars, foreign occupation, and imported ideologies…
New York. Ecco Press. 2021. 288 pages. WHAT DOES IT MEAN to reach for relevance? Stacking a historical genocide atop a modern tragedy makes for careful considerations. After all, Cher…
Cairo. Hoopoe. 2020. 324 pages. RASHA ADLY'S NOVEL The Girl with Braided Hair tells parallel love stories, with one set in contemporary Egypt, post-2011 uprising, and the oth…
New York. Abrams. 2021. 288 pages. PUBLISHED AS Girl in White Cotton in India, the Dubai-based American novelist Avni Doshi’s rechristened Booker-nominated debut, Burnt S…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2021. 176 pages. [Trigger warning: The following review mentions a sexual assault.] ARGENTINE AUTHOR Pola Oloixarac mean…
New York. Doubleday. 2020. 208 pages. THOUGH NO GHOSTS move through its pages, Kevin Barry’s That Old Country Music is a catalog of hauntings. The characters who populate the…
Beijing. Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House. 2021. 348 pages. WEN CHENG IS the name of a mysterious city. It’s hard to tell the explicit implication of the name, for…
New York. Spuyten Duyvil. 2021. 226 pages. AWARD-NOMINATED author Alexandros Plasatis’s Made by Sea and Wood, in Darkness is a nostalgic “novel in stories” portrait of his ho…
Portland, Oregon. Tin House Books. 2020. 546 pages. JENNIFER NANSUBUGA MAKUMBI’S second novel, A Girl Is a Body of Water, was published in the UK under the title…
Toronto, Ontario. Inhabit Education Books. 2020. 144 pages. COMICS CREATED BY Indigenous makers teach readers about contemporary Native North American peoples, their stories, traditio…