New York. Verso. 2020. 196 pages.
FOR HER SPLENDID Will and Testament (2019), Vigdis Hjorth allegedly based her narrative on family history (WLT, Spring 2020, 100).…
FICTION
New York. Seven Stories Press. 2021. 48 pages. “ONCE UPON A TIME there was a man who worked very hard and very quickly, and who had left his soul far behind him long ago . . .” So beg…
New York. Random House. 2021. 384 pages. HOW BEAUTIFUL WE WERE is Imbolo Mbue’s second novel to be published; however, Mbue started writing it long before her first novel,…
New York. Europa Editions. 2021. 192 pages. FORTY-SIX-YEAR OLD Mieko Kawakami refuses to trivialize the agony of adolescence; instead she bears witness to it. She has described her ow…
Windsor, Canada. Biblioasis. 2021. 399 pages. “SEA LOVES ME,” the title story of Mia Couto’s latest collection, brims with secrets, seduction, and the wisdom of ancestors. Zeca Perpét…
New York. Riverhead. 2020. 328 pages. DRIFTS. An appropriate title for a book of mostly one-page stands? A noun perhaps, short for whatever washes up from the depths? No, Kat…
New York. Ecco. 2020. 290 pages. MAXIMA IS A washed-up Filipino action hero, trained in the deadliest of martial arts, but her days of fighting bad guys on the big screen are over. Th…
New York. Contra Mundum Press. 2020. 147 pages. IT’S RAINING IN MOSCOW is the first collection of stories in English by Zsuzsa Selyem, a well-known Transylvanian Hungarian au…
New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 2020. 293 pages. MEGHA MAJUMDAR’S debut novel, A Burning, narrates the ramifications of a terrorist attack—as indicated by the title, the burning o…
Paris. P.O.L. 2020. 304 pages. IEGOR GRAN IS the son of the former Soviet dissident Andrei Sinyavsky (1925–1997). This is the partly fictionalized account of Sinyavsky’s clandestine w…
Miami. Alfaguara. 2020. 659 pages. GUILLERMO ARRIAGA’S Salvar el fuego has garnered him the prestigious Alfaguara Novel Prize for 2020. A major figure in Mexican cinema, Arri…
New York. Penguin. 2020. 272 pages. OTTESSA MOSHFESGH’S women do not assimilate. Whether the eponymous protagonist and her scatological fascinations in Eileen or the narrator…
McLean, Illinois. Dalkey Archive. 2019. 144 pages. THE TITLE OF Amanda Michalopoulou’s recent book, God’s Wife, is not deceiving. The novel is about God’s wife, the unnamed n…
Maple Shade, New Jersey. Lethe Press. 2020. 234 pages. JESUS AND JOHN begins with the resurrection of Christ, here Yeshua. He rises from the grave, but instead of following t…
Montreal. QC Fiction. 2020. 212 pages. IT’S A LOVE STORY with an epigraph from a novel about a wife accused of murdering her husband: “Just look how Madame loves Monsieur! You see, sh…
London. Istros Books. 2020. 372 pages. IMAGINE A LARGE building facing the rough waters of the Black Sea: a mental health hospital. Now imagine that same large building not quite faci…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2020. 327 pages. AS A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, Brandon Taylor’s debut novel, Real Life, has already achieved the status of one of the best no…
Trans. Emma Ramadan. New York. Seven Stories Press. 2020. 144 pages. A POCKETABLE, one-sitting read, Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying is an engrossing transcontinental and…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2020. 146 pages. IN ECHO ON THE BAY, Masatsugu Ono drops readers into the middle of a small fishing village on the southern Japanese island of…
New York. Europa Editions. 2020. 448 pages. READERS OF THE WORK under review might be forgiven for thinking that they were enjoying Kawakami Mieko’s (b. 1976) Breasts and Eggs…
New York. Open Letter. 2020. 150 pages. “AT THIS TIME of night, the armored helicopters fly over the city, the bats flutter against the office windows, and the rats scurry among the d…
Trans. Sondra Silverston. New York. Other Press. 2020. 461 pages. UNCONVENTIONAL ISRAELI writer Eshkol Nevo, the author of several prizewinning novels, has found a new way of reinvent…
New York. Grove Press. 2020. 304 pages. A SPOTLIGHT FOCUSED on strength can only cast a large shadow onto failure. Kelli Jo Ford’s novel-in-stories asks readers to examine the residua…
Dallas. Deep Vellum. 2020. 112 pages. OVER THE PAST FOUR decades, the Peruvian Mexican writer Mario Bellatin has produced one of the weirdest and wildest contemporary literary oeuvres…
Richmond, Virginia. Valancourt. 2020. 428 pages. TODAY YOU CAN watch horror films from just about everywhere. We are truly living in a golden age of horror films, not only in terms of…