New York. Archipelago. 2018. 1,164 pages.
Karl Ove Knausgaard has been crowned “the ideal writer of the present moment.” His six-part novel, My Struggle, sold half a million copies in Norway,…
MISCELLANEOUS
Stockholm. Atlas. 2017. 279 pages. Tanjas gata: Rysk vardag 1917–2017 (Tanya’s street: Everyday life in Russia, 1917–2017) is the fourth volume in a quartet of books about contemporary Russia…
New York. Ecco. 2017. 304 pages. In his foundational essay “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad” (The human factors of Cubanness), Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz wrote what has become one of the…
Boston. Nicholas Brealey. 2018. 195 pages. If you’ve ever given the side eye to a double-decker tour bus while tramping through foreign streets—or been guilty yourself of hopping on the top deck, came…
Berkeley, California. Stone Bridge Press. 2018. 308 pages. In March 2004 Tracy Franz began a journal to document a period of separation from her husband, a Zen monk spending a year at a six-hundred-ye…
New York. Viking. 2018. 576 pages. The heart of Steven Pinker’s important new book is in its title: Enlightenment Now. It is a stalwart defense of the ideals of the Enlightenment, recasting t…
Prague. Karolinum Press. 2018. 179 pages. Post Bellum is a Czech organization, mainly comprised of historians and reporters, dedicated to keeping alive the memories of witnesses to the twentieth centu…
Budapest. Magvető. 2017. 500 pages. Although it is advertised as “the first part of György Konrád’s roman-fleuve” (regényfolyam), Falevelek szélben (Ásatás I) (Leaves in the Wind [Excavation…
Mobile, Alabama. Negative Capability Press. 2017. 202 pages. Chris Arthur knows what an essay is: an attempt to reach a further, transcendent understanding through writing. Chris Arthur’s 2017 collect…
Boston. Academic Studies Press. 2017. 336 pages. This dense, exciting anthology brings together fifteen Ukrainian poetry and prose writers with works from the late-Soviet and, mostly, post-Soviet peri…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2018. 304 pages. “The world is very large,” John Porcellino tells us early on in From Lone Mountain, and we are convinced. Porcellino’s greatest gift as a car…
El Paso, Texas. Cinco Puntos Press. 2018. 368 pages. We are always revisiting our myths. In Europe and America, attention to myth has historically bolstered claims to national and (white) racial great…
New York. Seven Stories. 2018. 320 pages. “We have just said that we have our own words in English for the same things,” Lydia Davis intones within the carefully calibrated paragraphs of her story “Fr…
New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2017. 304 pages. When Umberto Eco died in early 2016, he had just finished putting together a collection of essays entitled Pape Satán Aleppe: Cronache di una…
New York. New Directions. 2018. 240 pages. In 2014 Daesh militants launched an assault on Sinjar in northern Iraq, home to hundreds of thousands of Yazidis—a religious minority whose belief system is…
2 vols. Budapest. Jelenkor. 2017. 611 & 596 pages. Péter Nádas is a writer with deep roots in the past. His first, short novel, Egy családregény vége (End of a family novel), published in…
Barcelona. Literatura Random House. 2016. 144 pages. If it wasn’t for the inevitably personal way in which this brief text was conceived, the argument of El punto ciego (The blind spot), by t…
Seattle. Fantagraphics Books. 2017. 264 pages. Standing on his balcony in the neighborhood of Sin el-Fil in east Beirut, Mazen Kerbaj plays his trumpet to the accompaniment of the Israeli air force, w…
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The Best We Could Do. New York. Abrams ComicArts. 2017. 327 pages. Saigon Calling: London 1963–75. Vancouver. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2017. 280 pages. Half a…
New York. Bloomsbury. 2017. 234 pages. Of the thousands of adages that elucidate translation, one of the most oft-quoted is Jorge Luis Borges’s “The original is unfaithful to the translation.” In thes…
Brooklyn. Restless Books. 2018. 304 pages. Ismail Kadare’s first and only collection of essays translated into English, this time directly from the Albanian originals written between 1985 and 2006, of…
Lincoln, Nebraska. University of Nebraska Press. 2017. 345 pages. None can deny that we live in an age of incredible change. Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place as a Time is an…
New York. Penguin Classics. 2017. 177 pages. Emma Reyes’s letters written to the Colombian historian and critic Germán Arciniegas from the 1960s to the 1990s were discovered and published after her de…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2017. 120 pages. Poppies of Iraq, an autobiographical graphic novel written by Brigitte Findakly and illustrated by Lewis Trondheim, contains familiar tropes…
Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2017. 304 pages. Jorge Carrión begins this paean to bookshops by writing: “Every bookshop is a condensed version of the world.” This axiomatic declaration is important as…