Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 120 pages.
The Balkan Wars spawned literature across genres, in languages from émigré English and German to nascent Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian. But Spomenka Štimec’s “f…
FICTION
New York. Knopf. 2017. 272 pages. For over two decades, Orhan Pamuk has given us the courage to remember the distant and the recent past, in signifiers and colors invisible before. That is why it is n…
Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2017. 144 pages. A mandala is the product of an integrated art; a mandala is made to map the cosmos. But the cosmos comes in many shapes and sizes. Antonio Tabucchi, in hi…
New York. Other Press. 2017 (© 2016). 446 pages. This novel, originally published serially in Japan’s largest newspaper, begins with two middle-aged Japanese sisters discussing the money left behind b…
New York. New Directions. 2017. 320 pages. In her latest novel, Go, Went, Gone, Jenny Erpenbeck, 2018 Puterbaugh Fellow, addresses the current refugee crisis that has had far-reaching politic…
Nottingham, United Kingdom. Noir Press. 2016. 183 pages. Epilepsy and psychosis, depression and lust, aging, poverty, betrayal, violence, and the mystery of the human spirit—beset, struggling, breakin…
London. Fitzcarraldo Editions. 2016 (©2013). 672 pages. The phrase “bricks and mortar” refers to the real estate in an east German city, Meyer’s Leipzig, which is likewise the setting for his earlier…
Madrid. Hispabooks. 2016. 810 pages. Invoking a mystique of the real in the tradition of Another Country, L’Éducation sentimentale, and Ulysses, Ramon Saizarbitoria has writ…
Frankfurt am Main. Westend Verlag. 2016. 349 pages. To be taken seriously, a political thriller must persuade its readers that the exciting fiction has been constructed around knowing—perhaps dangerou…
Paris. Gallimard. 2016. 226 pages. The novel that won the prestigious Goncourt Prize in 2016 begins on a grim note: “The baby is dead.” Most of the ensuing narrative is recounted in the form of an ext…
Victoria, Texas. Dalkey Archive Press. 2017. 105 pages. The central concept of Bodies of Summer is a good one: what if, after death, your consciousness uploaded to the Internet, where you cou…
Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink Books. 2017. 288 pages. In Jana Fawaz Elhassan’s first translated novel, she explores the entwinement of passion and affection with despair and anger through chil…
Ljouwert, Netherlands. Het Nieuwe Kanaal. 2016. 274 pages. In his eighties now, Durk van der Ploeg shows little evidence that he’s losing his literary touch. His latest, De lêste floed (The…
Victoria, Texas. Dalkey Archive Press. 2017. 204 pages. Vedrana Rudan’s new provocatrice, Tilda (unnamed until the penultimate chapter), recalls the protagonist of her first novel, Night, bot…
Portland, Oregon. Tin House Books. 2017. 336 pages. Taking on James Joyce is no small feat, but Ruth Gilligan pulls it off masterfully in her own distinctive voice while sprinkling in Samuel Beckett,…
Kraków. Wydawnictwo Literackie. 2016. 428 pages. The year is 1937. For nearly twenty years, Poland has been independent after a century and a half of foreign occupation. As Hitler casts an ever-longe…
New York. Vertical Comics. 2017. 174 pages. Dissolving Classroom is the sixth volume to translate Japanese mangaka Junji Ito’s probing visions of the horrifying and the weird into En…
New York. New Vessel Press. 2017. 200 pages. Moving the Palace won both the François Mauriac Prize from the Académie Française and the Prix Tropiques, so one opens its pages with high expecta…
Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2017. 110 pages. Camanchaca is a thick fog often seen along certain parts of the Chilean coast. Pushed along by the winds coming off the Pacific Ocean, it oft…
Tunis. Elyzad. 2016. 283 pages. Daoud Kaci / Dawood Casey is a person displaced by his thirst for independence and the rigors of French colonial rule. From Tunis to Palermo, New York, and the 1918 bat…
New York. New Directions. 2017. 96 pages. At his very finest, Osama Alomar is heir to Kahlil Gibran, whom he greatly admires, by way of the surrealists. Despite their apparent playful wit, Alomar’s d…
New York. New Vessel Press. 2017. 245 pages. In his second novel, Sergei Lebedev explores the thrills and failures of the late Soviet Union through the eyes of a young boy. Both a coming-of-age story…
New York. Black Cat. 2017 (©2016). 490 pages. This is a remarkable book, truly brilliant, whose 490 pages is initially intimidating, but reading it is as pleasurable as binge-watching a miniseries or…
New York. Soho Press. 2017. 291 pages. In Savage Theories, Pola Oloixarac addresses the conflict of being both an individual with ideas and a social animal with libido. Theory and sexuality a…
Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink Books. 2017. 252 pages. Mustafa Khalifa’s debut effort, The Shell, is difficult to stomach. It is also undoubtedly necessary. A fictional account that e…