New York. Akashic Books. 2018. 217 pages.
In the nearly fifteen years since Akashic Books premiered its Noir anthology, the short-fiction series has examined the criminal and often perilous r…
FICTION
San Francisco. City Lights Books. 2018. 128 pages. Gabriela Alemán weaves noir, feminism, satire, and environmentalism into the strange history of Poso Wells, Ecuador. Poso Wells follows jour…
New York. Vintage. 2018. 132 pages. It is early December and our narrator is under pressure to complete a screenplay for a sequel to his highly popular previous comedy. He and his wife and daughter ha…
Washington, DC. Gallaudet University Press. 2018. 221 pages. Sister and Brother chronicles the lives of Albert and Helena Berg, siblings from an affluent family of musicians in nineteenth-cen…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2018. 502 pages. Approximately one-third of the way through Richard Powers’s The Overstory, a scientist whose findings had originally been attacked discovers that she…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2018. 160 pages. Jérôme Ruillier’s The Strange is the timely, and timeless, story of a fictional undocumented immigrant’s struggle to make a new life. Through…
Cape Town. Kwela Books. 2018. 207 pages. Niq Mhlongo’s new short-story collection begins in Soweto’s Avalon Cemetery. The narrator goes to find her absent father’s grave, superstitiously hoping that i…
Hong Kong. Signal 8 Press. 2018. 190 pages. In Insignificance, Xu Xi ambitiously claimed that she was doing a little bit of what Dream of the Red Chamber was doing—to create classic…
Simsbury, Connecticut. Mandel Vilar Press. 2018. 320 pages. Zion’s Fiction is a project many years in the making, but it was worth the wait. In this collection, readers will find a wealth of…
Albuquerque, New Mexico. World Weaver Press. 2018. 286 pages. Solarpunk is the third installment in a triptych including Vaporpunk and Dieselpunk, all edited by Brazilian sc…
Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2018. 478 pages. One expects a thick novel to be expansive in theme or epically cover a great deal of time and territory, but lately several mysteries, especially in translat…
New York. Other Press. 2018. 240 pages. Amid a midlife crisis, Karolina Andersson knows her “pathetic” life must change so she can face the end of the day—eventide. A tenured art history professor at…
New York. Archipelago. 2018. 120 pages. It was the very day Nazi Germany launched their assault on Poland—September 1, 1939—that the Dutch writer Willem Frederik Hermans turned eighteen. Within a year…
New York. Tor. 2018. 384 pages. Multiple-award-winning Chinese science-fiction author Cixin Liu is having a moment in the anglophone world. Because of the 2014 English translation of his novel The Thr…
Madrid. Alfaguara. 2018. 504 pages. Mexican novelist Jorge Volpi has won the 2018 Alfaguara Novel Prize with Una novela criminal, a documentary novel examining the use of illegal tactics by M…
Paris. Lattès. 2017. 365 pages. Ivan and Ivana, whose intertwined destinies structure this novel, are twins born in Guadeloupe. The brother and sister grow up in difficult circumstances: their mother…
Paris. Flammarion. 2018. 868 pages. A scant two months after winning the prestigious, quirky Prix Décembre for the first volume, Grégoire Bouillier brought out the second half of his Le Dossier M…
Paris. Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle. 2016. 218 pages. The translations of Petit pays into thirty languages and its five French literary prizes attest to the universal appeal of this first…
Hamburg, Germany. Argument Verlag mit Ariadne. 2017. 352 pages. Alles so hell da vorn (It’s all so bright over there) is Monika Geier’s seventh outing for the likable and slightly chaotic Det…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 288 pages. Set in western Australia, Tim Winton’s newest novel features a teenager who wants to escape an abusive home but can’t do so until his parents pass…
Seattle. AmazonCrossing. 2018. 161 pages. Kazuki Kaneshiro’s (b. 1968) Naoki Prize–winning Go begins with a famous epigraph from Romeo and Juliet and sets, thereby, both the scene an…
Oakland, California. Transit Books. 2018. 160 pages. Despite being slim, Blue Self-Portrait is at once dizzying and—at times—exhausting. Lefebvre’s first novel to be translated into English i…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2018. 328 pages. First published in 2014 at the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine’s east, Serhiy Zhadan’s Mesopotamia tells the story of Kharkiv,…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2018. 68 pages. Anna Haifisch’s absurdist graphic novel Von Spatz is brilliant, weird, and darkly funny. Von Spatz is a tribute to artists, by an art…
Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2018. 400 pages. Despite Transparent City’s focus on a community slipping down a precipice and toward urban demise, Ondjaki’s prose pulses with life. In the hour…