New York. Seven Stories Press. 2020. 568 pages.
IT IS A RARE pleasure to find a graphic novel where energetic black-and-white drawings and simple but eloquent text are intertwined wi…
FICTION
Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2020. 296 pages. POUPEH MISSAGHI'S DEBUT, trans(re)lating house one, is a hybrid novel set in the aftermath of Iran’s 2009…
Blaenau-Ffestiniog, UK. Cinnamon Press. 2020. 250 pages. AT THE FEET OF MOTHERS, a Qur’anic trope for paradise, seems initially unrelated to smart but naïve, one-eye…
New York. New Directions. 2020. 144 pages. ADANIA SHIBLI'S THIRD NOVEL, Minor Detail, cements her position among the top ranks of Palestinian novelists working today. In her…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2019. 320 pages. HELON HABILA'S NEW NOVEL, Travelers, unfolds against the principle of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the Germa…
Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2020. 181 pages. IN HER SUCCINCT yet electrifying homage to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa conceptualizes the contin…
New York. Catapult. 2019. 243 pages. THE WINNER OF last year’s Man Booker International Prize, Celestial Bodies narrates its stories through three generations of a family liv…
New York. Ballantine. 2020. 318 pages. THANKS TO THE WORK of Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkins, English audiences can experience the latest offering from the historical fiction artist,…
New York. New Directions. 2020. 64 pages. ANNE CARSON'S LATEST published work is brilliantly conceived but untidily written. The idea of a feminist reinterpretation of Euripides’ play…
Barcelona. Alfaguara. 2019. 352 pages. IN TIEMPOS RECIOS, Mario Vargas Llosa returns to a central theme in his fiction: political power and Latin American dictatorships. In 1…
Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink. 2019. 350 pages. WHAT CAN ONE look for in the daunting vastness of the desert? What happens when the desert teems with the harrowing echoes of t…
New York. New Directions. 2020. 224 pages. OF THE TWO EPIGRAPHS that appear at the beginning of Hurricane Season, the second is taken from Mexican author Jorge Ibargüengoitia…
Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dzanc Books. 2019. 195 pages. John Englehardt’s debut novel, Bloomland, is a fictional memoir of the aftermath of a campus shooting in the Ozarks. Definitively middle Ame…
Santa Rosa, California. WTAW Press. 2019. 184 pages. The fifty-two short stories in Like Water by Russian author Olga Zilberbourg illustrate protagonists trying to stay afloat. In her Englis…
Bogotá. Seix Barral/Planeta. 2019. 621 pages. Much ink is spent on bidding the Great Latin American Novel, speciously fused with “total novels.” Vargas Llosa and Bolaño wrote them outrightly, while ol…
Alfaguara. 2019. 265 pages. Argentine writer and literary critic Patricio Pron won the prestigious Alfaguara Prize for 2019 with Mañana tendremos otros nombres, a novel that examines relatio…
Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2019. 1020 pages. Ducks, Newburyport opens with a quiet moment of motherhood: a lioness contemplating the awareness of her cubs and the absolute necessity of he…
Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2019. 251 pages. The characters in Dead Heat, the debut novel by Hungarian author Benedek Totth, are absolute monsters. They are cruel in word and deed, and when…
Norfolk, United Kingdom. Salt Publishing. 213 pages. The fourteen stories in this provocative collection critique postmodern culture, whose social hierarchies and commodity capitalism, fed by “blood…
Chennai, India. Westland Books. 2019. 184 pages. The publication of the 2013 novel The House with a Thousand Stories announced the arrival of Aruni Kashyap as a new voice in the burgeoning o…
Toronto. Inkyard Press. 2019. 422 pages. In their debut novel, Dear Haiti, Love Alaine, co-authors Maika and Maritza Moulite craft a mosaic of modern-day Haiti that simultaneously exploits an…
Ed. Raph Cormack. Manchester, UK. Comma Press. 2019. 144 pages. It is not often that Western audiences have the opportunity to delve into an anthology of contemporary Egyptian fiction; a book that tra…
New York. Europa Editions. 2020. 245 pages. Shokoofeh Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is an astoundingly imaginative work of fiction with deep roots in Persian culture. The n…
Raleigh, North Carolina. Regal House. 2019. 206 pages. In this masterful collection of short stories, characters from urban Nairobi and rural villages burst into life in bold, expressionistic strokes,…
Paris. Grasset. 2019. 377 pages. Laurent Binet’s last novel, La septième fonction du langage (2015), was an elaborate, cleverly constructed satire of the postmodernist period and many of its…