New York. Ecco / HarperCollins. 2012. ISBN 9780062095626How seemingly easy it is to assess the latest works by authors who write slowly, who—one wants to believe—carefully measure and remeasure their…
FICTION
- Seuil. Paris. 2012. ISBN 9782020986694Tierno Monénembo has traveled widely since he left Guinea in 1969 to escape Sékou Touré’s dictatorship. His novels often reflect his own experiences or are b…
- Madeline G. Levine, tr. Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern University Press. 2012. ISBN 9780810127937After a distinguished career as a ballistics and algorithms patent holder, Wilhelm Dichter start…
- New York. Riverhead. 2012. ISBN 9781594487361These days, more and more people in both the United States and Latin America are “downloadeando” music, “parqueando” their cars, and eating “lonche” in the…
- Frank Stock, tr. Los Angeles. Semiotext(e) (MIT Press, distr.). 2012. ISBN 9781584351115Abdellah Taïa’s Une mélancolie arabe was published in 2008 in Paris, where he now lives. It is in many…
- Munich. Hanser. 2012. ISBN 9783446238657If you aren’t yet familiar with Botho Strauss, one of Germany’s most critically acclaimed prose writers of the last forty years and arguably its most well-…
- Andrea G. Labinger, tr. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Latin American Literary Review Press. 2012. ISBN 9781891270505Friends of Mine contains a series of seemingly unrelated events in the liv…
- Paris. Albin Michel. 2012. ISBN 9782226242969Feminist revisionist mythmaking has often seized on the legend of Bluebeard, supposedly inspired by the fifteenth-century Breton serial killer Gilles…
- John Fletcher, tr. London. MacLehose Press. 2012. ISBN 9780857050564 With Three Strong Women, Marie NDiaye became the first black woman to win the Prix Goncourt. This intri…
- Noha Radwan, tr. Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink. 2012. ISBN 9781566568821Shagara, a minor employee in the shipyards of Alexandria and the first-person narrator of The House of Jasmine—…
- Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2012. ISBN 9781555976118Shehan Karunatilaka’s first novel brilliantly exemplifies the best capacity of contemporary literature to make the stuff of local lives absolutely…
- Artarmon, New South Wales / Marietta, Georgia. Giramondo / Top Shelf. 2012. ISBN 9781603091534 The Australian comics scene has historically been a parenthetical description added to anglopho…
- Diego Trelles Paz, ed. Janet Hendrickson, tr. Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2012. ISBN 9781934824641 The Future Is Not Ours compiles twenty-three stories from fifteen Latin American…
- Hornsea, England. PS Publishing. 2012. ISBN 9781848634541Synth is a drug, able to induce full sensory hallucinations indistinguishable from reality. But Synth is new, of uncertain provenance, its…
- Marina Harss, tr. New York. Other Press. 2012. ISBN 9781590515112 Writer and filmmaker Cristina Comencini’s 2009 novel Quando la notte was a hit in Italy, as was her film based on the bo…
- Paris. Gallimard. 2012. ISBN 9782070136186 Rewritings of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe have been numerous, especially among Caribbean writers. Robinson Crusoe presumably landed on the isl…
- New York. Ecco / HarperCollins. 2013. ISBN 9780062198792Rilla Askew’s fourth novel is a brilliant evocation of Heraclitus’s axiom that character is fate—an ironic evocation she both confirms and…
- Barcelona. Anagrama. 2011. ISBN 9788433972279Formas de volver a casa, Alejandro Zambra’s third novel, is the logical continuation of his two previous works: Bonsái (2006) and La…
- Anne McLean & Rosalind Harvey, tr. New York. New Directions. 2012. ISBN 9780811219617 Enrique Vila-Matas is a consistently rich and challenging contemporary Spanish-language novelist. Revered…
- Athens. Metaihmio. 2011. ISBN 9789605014940 Vasia Tzanakari’s first novel, Tzoni kai Loulou (Johnny and Loulou), is a love story set in contemporary Athens during a time of crisis, unemp…
- Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky. Roadside Picnic. Olena Bormashenko, tr. Ursula K. Le Guin, intro. Chicago. Chicago Review Press. 2012. ISBN 9781613743416Geoff Dyer. Zona:…
- New York. Hogarth. 2012. ISBN 9780307955890At the beginning of The Watch, Nizam, a young woman from a mountain village in Afghanistan, arrives in a clearing outside a US outpost, using her ha…
- Lytton Smith, tr. Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2012. ISBN 9781934824351In the opening scene of Children in Reindeer Woods, Rafael and some fellow soldiers come across a farm. The soldier…
- Max Weiss, tr. Cairo. American University in Cairo Press (Oxford University Press, distr.). 2011. ISBN 9789774164804Set on the eve of the Iraq War, A Tunisian Tale reveals a westernized elite…
- Daniel Bowles, tr. Las Vegas, Nevada. AmazonCrossing. 2011. ISBN 9781611090574Vivian Atkinson, the eponymous protagonist of Thomas Meinecke’s 1998 novel, is the child of a German mother and an America…