Berkeley, California. Counterpoint Press. 2023. 217 pages.
A Dictator Calls melds history, fiction, memoir, and myth to explore the pernicious link between art and autocracy. Focused…
FICTION
New York. Grove Press. 2023. 47 pages. The Irish writer Claire Keegan is one of the most significant story writers in the English language. In her native country, she is considered a…
Oakland, California. Transit Books. 2023. 112 pages. If you are looking for a manageable first exposure to the work of 2023’s Nobel Prize winner, Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, you might…
New York. Harper. 2023. 299 pages. My main defense for reading so much mystery and crime fiction is that such books help sustain classic realism. Characters are set in an environment…
Lima. Alfaguara. 2023. 258 pages. In early 2023 Gustavo Rodríguez’s latest novel, Cien cuyes, was awarded Spain’s coveted Premio Alfaguara de Novela. Cien cuyes tells the story of Eu…
Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2023. 224 pages. Black Foam, longlisted for the 2019 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, is a painful cry for survival in a world where truth can be a de…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2023. 436 pages. Anne McLean’s English translation of Retrospective, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, is a masterpiece in literary translation. Not only should we b…
Dallas. Deep Vellum. 2023. 200 pages. In Recital of the Dark Verses, Mexican poet and critic Luis Felipe Fabre takes the famous sixteenth-century verse of Carmelite…
London. Verso. 2023. 276 pages. The award-winning Crooked Plow is a family saga set in the sertão, or backlands, of Brazil’s State of Bahia, an area that since colonial times has been…
Cairo. Hoopoe. 2023. 443 pages. A Stranger in Baghdad is the literary debut of author Elizabeth Loudon, who lived in Iraq during the 1970s. It is a stirring novel about a family—and t…
New York. Ballantine Books. 2023. 352 pages. Parini Shroff’s debut novel, The Bandit Queens, uses the story of Phoolan Devi (the “Bandit Queen”) as a vehicle to consider the violence…
Minneapolis. Graywolf. 2023. 136 pages. Max Porter burst on the literary scene in 2015 with his debut novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, which went on to win the Dylan Thomas Pr…
Edinburgh. Charco Press. 2023. 104 pages. Of Cattle and Men is an excellent book of many dark, quiet questions. What does death mean to men who work in a slaughterhouse, who manually…
New York. Archipelago Books. 2023. 340 pages. Tali Girls, Afghan author Siamak Herawi’s first novel to be translated into English (melodically, by Sara Khalili), is a propulsive and…
New York. One World. 2023. 304 pages. Both the epigraph to Victor LaValle’s new novel (taken from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon) and the opening paragraph conspire to capture the re…
Middletown, Connecticut. Wesleyan University Press. 2023. 109 pages. The prolific author of more than forty works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry since 1961, recipient of the 2022…
Hangzhou. Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House. 2023. 197 pages. Nobel laureate Mo Yan once swore in front of the Shakespeare statue in Stratford upon Avon to take advantage…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 256 pages. This new collection of short stories by Yiyun Li will only enhance her reputation as one of the foremost fiction writers in Amer…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 256 pages. Regret is a force that changes us. It immerses us in melancholy and begs questions, without answers, about what could’ve been. T…
New York. New Directions. 2023. 293 pages. Is the bond between a government and its citizens comparable to the relationship between lovers? I couldn’t help but ask myself this questi…
New York. Soho Press. 2023. 458 pages. In one of my favorite moments in Siddhartha Deb’s ambitious, multiple-strand, cross-genre epic The Light at the End of the World, a man stands before an oracular…
Beijing. Beijing United. 2023. 320 pages. Liang Xiaosheng (b. 1949) always called himself a recorder of the era. He is good at realistic writing. Unlike those who depict and reflect r…
Stockholm. Artisticum. 2022. 133 pages. It takes ingenuity to write a novel combining a reckoning with the place of one’s birth and an homage to a great architect who was never there.…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 410 pages. Dramatic irony is one of the basic theatrical devices. It works by withholding certain knowledge from a character, while sharing…
New York. Europa Editions. 2023. 512 pages. One would need forever to plunge into the upheavals that have shaken Russia over the past century. Forty-six-year-old Guzel Yakhina underst…