New York. Liveright. 2023. 166 pages.
In music, when one wants to sound impressive, it’s best to play something fast; prestissimo gets the audience’s pulse up. If what is desired, how…
FICTION
Prague. Karolinum Press. 2022. 110 pages. Much has been written on the horrifying abuses of justice in the former Soviet Union and in most countries of the Communist bloc, but relatively little specif…
New York. Other Press. 2022. 419 pages. Anyone who’s been to a large family gathering has heard memories turned into stories, stories in which the teller has enlarged on the known facts. We appreciate…
Frankfurt am Main. CEEOLPress. 2022. 400 pages. This novel is terrifying. Hungarian writer Gábor Zoltán, after a great deal of archival research, has created a nightmarish recounting of events from th…
Syracuse, New York. Syracuse University Press. 2022. 623 pages. Alexandrian-born novelist Reem Bassiouney has steadily been establishing herself as one of the freshest voices in Arabic literature with…
Changsha. Hunan Literature & Art Publishing House. 2022. 396 pages. Ru He Shi Hao (What to Be) is Yan Zhen’s fifth novel, published eight years after his last one, Huo Zhe Zhi Shang (Above Being A…
New York. Columbia University Press. 2022. 168 pages. The first novel of its kind to have escaped suppression, The Backstreets is a harrowing vision of the experience of the Uyghurs, an ethnic group s…
New York. Open Letter. 2022. 208 pages. In this collection of quietly penetrating short stories, Spanish writer Sara Mesa tells the tales of ordinary people and wrinkles their daily monotony with aber…
New York. Ballantine Books. 2022. 237 pages. Blitz Bazawule’s debut novel, The Scent of Burnt Flowers, is an evocative journey through America and Ghana of the 1960s. Bazawule is an award-winning visu…
Berlin. Aufbau. 2022. 179 pages. This enchanting fiction debut centers around Nelli, a woman who emigrated in the 1990s from the former Soviet Union as a child and was raised by her grandmother in a s…
Brooklyn. Spuyten Duyvil. 2023. 294 pages. Three times I knocked on the door at 12 rue des Juifs. I waited. The courtyard still. From steep wooden stairs leading to the ramparts, a cat hissed at me. I…
Portland, Oregon. Tin House. 2022. 296 pages. When Ramón, the gentle Chilean at the center of María José Ferrada’s dreamlike novel, climbs a billboard and sets up a mattress on the elevated platform i…
London. Istros Books. 2023. 143 pages. Curvaceous and wearing pink, the old bomb on the cover of Balkan Bombshells has sparked a debate more explosive than the mostly quiet stories it contains. As exp…
New York. Astra House. 2023. 304 pages. Kyung-Sook Shin’s I Went to See My Father, deftly translated by Anton Hur, is a quietly epic contemplation on grief and the relationships, responsibilities, and…
New York. Feminist Press. 2022. 376 pages. The Age of Goodbyes, recipient of the China Times Open Book Award, is a captivating English-language debut for best-selling author Li Zi Shu (WLT, March 2023…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2023. 108 pages. Ten Planets, a collection of fantasy and science fiction stories, is Yuri Herrera’s most recent work to appear in English translation. Herrera has been ma…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2023. 180 pages. The Argentina-born writer Andrés Neuman made quite the splash with his Traveler of the Century (2009), a voluminous novel cut from the cloth of early…
Hangzhou. Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House. 2022. 380 pages. Ming Yun (Destiny) is a novel that follows Cai Chongda’s Pi Nang (Vessel: A Memoir), which familiarizes readers with Atai, who…
Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2023. 332 pages. The Fires is two things: it is a premonitory tale of what can happen when the forces residing within the earth and the human heart go unheeded, and it is a m…
New York. Arcade. 2023. 168 pages. “In the beginning, we were souls without bodies.” So begins the origin myth that launches Chiang-Sheng Kuo’s multi-award-winning, best-selling novel The Piano Tuner,…
New York. Harper Voyager. 2022. 560 pages. Given the subtitle of this alternate-history novel about language, translation, colonialism, and war, one would be forgiven for spending most of one’s time a…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2023. 336 pages. Milena Urbanska, the main character of Vesna Goldsworthy’s Iron Curtain: A Love Story, is a child of privilege. An offspring of one of the two founders of a po…
New York. New York Review Books Classics. 2022. 296 pages. Maxim Osipov’s stunning second collection of six short stories and four essays, Kilometer 101, follows his scintillating Rock, Paper, Scisso…
San Antonio, Texas. Aztlan Libre Press. 2022. 618 pages. This debut novel is not for the faint of heart nor for the linguistically challenged. Part fiction, part memoir, and full of photographic and c…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2023. 157 pages. When Patrick Modiano was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014, his writing was nearly unknown in the United States. Since then,…