New York. Penguin. 2020. 407 pages.
PHIL KLAY’S COLLECTION of short stories, Redeployment (2014), dealt with the Iraq War, sometimes directly, sometimes as remembered or rela…
FICTION
New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2021. 272 pages. IN AN ERA WHEN alienation and anomie are daily topics, Will McPhail’s graphic novel In. will resonate with many readers.…
New York. Seagull Books. 2020. 344 pages. A LAND LIKE YOU follows Egypt from 1918 to 1952, as Western commodity capitalism, wars, foreign occupation, and imported ideologies…
New York. Ecco Press. 2021. 288 pages. WHAT DOES IT MEAN to reach for relevance? Stacking a historical genocide atop a modern tragedy makes for careful considerations. After all, Cher…
Cairo. Hoopoe. 2020. 324 pages. RASHA ADLY'S NOVEL The Girl with Braided Hair tells parallel love stories, with one set in contemporary Egypt, post-2011 uprising, and the oth…
New York. Abrams. 2021. 288 pages. PUBLISHED AS Girl in White Cotton in India, the Dubai-based American novelist Avni Doshi’s rechristened Booker-nominated debut, Burnt S…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2021. 176 pages. [Trigger warning: The following review mentions a sexual assault.] ARGENTINE AUTHOR Pola Oloixarac mean…
New York. Doubleday. 2020. 208 pages. THOUGH NO GHOSTS move through its pages, Kevin Barry’s That Old Country Music is a catalog of hauntings. The characters who populate the…
Beijing. Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House. 2021. 348 pages. WEN CHENG IS the name of a mysterious city. It’s hard to tell the explicit implication of the name, for…
New York. Spuyten Duyvil. 2021. 226 pages. AWARD-NOMINATED author Alexandros Plasatis’s Made by Sea and Wood, in Darkness is a nostalgic “novel in stories” portrait of his ho…
Portland, Oregon. Tin House Books. 2020. 546 pages. JENNIFER NANSUBUGA MAKUMBI’S second novel, A Girl Is a Body of Water, was published in the UK under the title…
Toronto, Ontario. Inhabit Education Books. 2020. 144 pages. COMICS CREATED BY Indigenous makers teach readers about contemporary Native North American peoples, their stories, traditio…
Barcelona. Libros del Asteroide. 2021. 128 pages. EDUARDO HALFON’S LATEST novel explores the power of naming and appearance and what they conceal, and the vulnerabilities experienced…
Norvik Press. 2020. 458 pages. WORLD WAR II and its immediate ramifications are two of the most oft-treated subjects in anglophone popular fiction. It is still rare, however, to find…
Columbus, Ohio. Two Dollar Radio. 2021. 173 pages. WITH THIS THIRD offering by Yelena Moskovich, A Door Behind a Door, readers can be assured of Moskovich’s continuity: strea…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2020. 248 pages. THE DEATH OF VIVEK OJI breaks the reader’s heart at every turn. Knowing Vivek dies before one even opens the book, the reader’s te…
Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2021. 136 pages. IN MARÍA OSPINA’S first book of short fiction, Variations on the Body, each story lets the reader into the life of a differe…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2021. 183 pages. THE MIND RECEDES, reality remains—and writing. This is the landscape wherein Second Place, the new novel of Rachel Cusk—…
New York. Knopf. 2021. 176 pages. WHEREABOUTS is Jhumpa Lahiri’s first novel written in Italian and translated into English by herself. It is also her first novel since T…
New York. Knopf. 2021. 256 pages. FIRST PERSON SINGULAR, a surprisingly poignant collection of eight short stories by Haruki Murakami (b. 1949), feels like an old book. It is…
Manchester. Comma Press. 2021. 112 pages. THE BOOK OF RAMALLAH brings together ten short stories to deliver a stunning and evocative portrait of this thriving city in Palesti…
Toronto. Coach House Books. 2020. 166 pages. WHEN READERS MEET The Imago Stage’s narrator, she has been offline so long that she’s “starting to suffocate.” Her solution? “I’v…
Hyderabad. Eka. 2020. 250 pages. IN ESTUARY, HIS LATEST NOVEL in English translation, Tamil writer Perumal Murugan depicts the predicament of the generation gap between paren…
New York. Overlook Press. 2020. 391 pages. LARS MYTTING’S Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way became an international best-seller soon af…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2020. 228 pages. NORI TAKES PLACE IN 1986 in the suburbs of Osaka, and it follows the daily adventures of a young girl named Noriko, or Nori…