New York. Ballantine Books. 2020. 274 pages.
FRANCES CHA, A FORMER travel and culture reporter for CNN in Seoul, aims to engross in her debut novel If I Had Your Face, a desp…
FICTION
McLean, Illinois. Dalkey Archive Press. 2020. ROSSANA CAMPO (b. 1963) burst on the Italian literary scene in 1992 with a picaresque novel about underwear: her own. A…
New York. Atria Books. 2020. 384 pages. SUSAN ABULHAWA TITLES her latest work with the words of James Baldwin. One book at a time, she continues to personify the Palestinian story in…
Barcelona. Editorial Anagrama. 2020. 421 pages. ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA—who frequently expounds on why the Great Latin American Novel will be distinguished by its poeticity and keeps garneri…
New York. Other Press. 2021. 128 pages. IN A RECENT INTERVIEW in La Vanguardia, Catalan author Sergi Pàmies remarks that “we are fiction and reality at the same time.” Accord…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 160 pages. IN THE BLOOD-MIRED trenches of World War I, an unwilling soldier ascends to an agent of death. Though David Diop anchors At N…
Portland. Tin House. 2021. 180 pages. WHEN SHE GOES TO SCHOOL , which isn’t often, the seven-year-old protagonist of this terrific novel is reminded that she has atypical interests. L…
Edinburgh. Charco Press. 2021. 174 pages. IN THE AFTERWORD TO A Perfect Cemetery, translator Jennifer Croft contemplates the crucial translation challenge of rendering the re…
Kolkata. Seagull Books. 2021. 312 pages. WHAT IS CHESS if not a metaphorical microcosm of a myriad of human institutions, conflicts, and systems? In Chess with My Grandfather,…
New York. Pantheon Books. 2021. 304 pages. AT FIRST IT APPEARS that Morningside Heights is yet another campus tale of the professor-meets-grad-student variety, but Joshua Hen…
New York. Tor Books. 2020. 336 pages. CIXIN LIU likes to think big. Macromolecules, vast time spans, galaxies, and universes: these are just some of the materials Liu plays with (ofte…
Cairo. Hoopoe Press. 2021. 401 pages. THE ARABIC READER IS witnessing an evolution in the Arabic novel, particularly in the past decade and in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Noveli…
New York. Verso. 2020. 196 pages. FOR HER SPLENDID Will and Testament (2019), Vigdis Hjorth allegedly based her narrative on family history (WLT, Spring 2020, 100).…
New York. Seven Stories Press. 2021. 48 pages. “ONCE UPON A TIME there was a man who worked very hard and very quickly, and who had left his soul far behind him long ago . . .” So beg…
New York. Random House. 2021. 384 pages. HOW BEAUTIFUL WE WERE is Imbolo Mbue’s second novel to be published; however, Mbue started writing it long before her first novel,…
New York. Europa Editions. 2021. 192 pages. FORTY-SIX-YEAR OLD Mieko Kawakami refuses to trivialize the agony of adolescence; instead she bears witness to it. She has described her ow…
Windsor, Canada. Biblioasis. 2021. 399 pages. “SEA LOVES ME,” the title story of Mia Couto’s latest collection, brims with secrets, seduction, and the wisdom of ancestors. Zeca Perpét…
New York. Riverhead. 2020. 328 pages. DRIFTS. An appropriate title for a book of mostly one-page stands? A noun perhaps, short for whatever washes up from the depths? No, Kat…
New York. Ecco. 2020. 290 pages. MAXIMA IS A washed-up Filipino action hero, trained in the deadliest of martial arts, but her days of fighting bad guys on the big screen are over. Th…
New York. Contra Mundum Press. 2020. 147 pages. IT’S RAINING IN MOSCOW is the first collection of stories in English by Zsuzsa Selyem, a well-known Transylvanian Hungarian au…
New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 2020. 293 pages. MEGHA MAJUMDAR’S debut novel, A Burning, narrates the ramifications of a terrorist attack—as indicated by the title, the burning o…
Paris. P.O.L. 2020. 304 pages. IEGOR GRAN IS the son of the former Soviet dissident Andrei Sinyavsky (1925–1997). This is the partly fictionalized account of Sinyavsky’s clandestine w…
Miami. Alfaguara. 2020. 659 pages. GUILLERMO ARRIAGA’S Salvar el fuego has garnered him the prestigious Alfaguara Novel Prize for 2020. A major figure in Mexican cinema, Arri…
New York. Penguin. 2020. 272 pages. OTTESSA MOSHFESGH’S women do not assimilate. Whether the eponymous protagonist and her scatological fascinations in Eileen or the narrator…
McLean, Illinois. Dalkey Archive. 2019. 144 pages. THE TITLE OF Amanda Michalopoulou’s recent book, God’s Wife, is not deceiving. The novel is about God’s wife, the unnamed n…