Maple Shade, New Jersey. Lethe Press. 2020. 234 pages.
JESUS AND JOHN begins with the resurrection of Christ, here Yeshua. He rises from the grave, but instead of following t…
FICTION
Montreal. QC Fiction. 2020. 212 pages. IT’S A LOVE STORY with an epigraph from a novel about a wife accused of murdering her husband: “Just look how Madame loves Monsieur! You see, sh…
London. Istros Books. 2020. 372 pages. IMAGINE A LARGE building facing the rough waters of the Black Sea: a mental health hospital. Now imagine that same large building not quite faci…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2020. 327 pages. AS A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, Brandon Taylor’s debut novel, Real Life, has already achieved the status of one of the best no…
Trans. Emma Ramadan. New York. Seven Stories Press. 2020. 144 pages. A POCKETABLE, one-sitting read, Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying is an engrossing transcontinental and…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2020. 146 pages. IN ECHO ON THE BAY, Masatsugu Ono drops readers into the middle of a small fishing village on the southern Japanese island of…
New York. Europa Editions. 2020. 448 pages. READERS OF THE WORK under review might be forgiven for thinking that they were enjoying Kawakami Mieko’s (b. 1976) Breasts and Eggs…
New York. Open Letter. 2020. 150 pages. “AT THIS TIME of night, the armored helicopters fly over the city, the bats flutter against the office windows, and the rats scurry among the d…
Trans. Sondra Silverston. New York. Other Press. 2020. 461 pages. UNCONVENTIONAL ISRAELI writer Eshkol Nevo, the author of several prizewinning novels, has found a new way of reinvent…
New York. Grove Press. 2020. 304 pages. A SPOTLIGHT FOCUSED on strength can only cast a large shadow onto failure. Kelli Jo Ford’s novel-in-stories asks readers to examine the residua…
Dallas. Deep Vellum. 2020. 112 pages. OVER THE PAST FOUR decades, the Peruvian Mexican writer Mario Bellatin has produced one of the weirdest and wildest contemporary literary oeuvres…
Richmond, Virginia. Valancourt. 2020. 428 pages. TODAY YOU CAN watch horror films from just about everywhere. We are truly living in a golden age of horror films, not only in terms of…
New York. Open Letter. 2021. 140 pages. ELEVEN SOOTY DREAMS is the latest book out in English by one of Antoine Volodine’s postexotic heteronyms, Manuela Draeger (see WLT…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2020. 296 pages. THE DISCOMFORT OF EVENING received the 2020 ANV Debut Award and the International Booker Prize. Marieke Lucas Rijneveld is the f…
New York. Bloomsbury. 2020. 272 pages. HALL AFTER ENDLESS marble hall. In some, bones of the dead are devotedly cared for; in others, waves arch and albatrosses rear their young amon…
New York. Knopf. 2020. 264 pages. THE PUBLICATION of Transcendent Kingdom follows Yaa Gyasi’s award-winning first novel, Homegoing (2016), and it doesn’t disappoint.…
Beijing. People’s Literature Publishing House. 2020. 380 pages. THE GERMAN WRITER Martin Walser once declared, “If one wants to talk about China, Mo Yan is a must-read.” Now, eight ye…
New York. New Press. 2020. 256 pages. IN 2015, ALAIN MABANCKOU crafted a modern folktale with Black Moses. The novel followed the titular child’s odyssey through one of the m…
Berkeley. Counterpoint Press. 2020. 177 pages. OPENING WITH THE DEATH of Kadare’s mother (the “doll” of the title) in 1994, rewinding to her marriage in 1933, then moving forward till…
London. Seagull Books. 2020. 273 pages. THE PREMISE OF MR. K RELEASED, written in prerevolutionary, self-imposed exile and published twenty years postfactum, is simple: conde…
Melbourne. Arden. 2019. 161 pages. CHANDANI LOKUGÉ’S new novel, My Van Gogh, winds its way from Australia to France with the lilt of an ancient pilgrim song. The novel, which…
St. Paul. River Boat Books. 2020. 280 pages THIS NOVEL OF ANTICIPATION is set in Great Britain in the middle years of the twenty-first century, but by virtue of the heady mix of polit…
Toronto. Coach House Books. 2020. 144 pages. FAUNA, A COLLECTION OF dreamily surreal linked stories, is a recent contribution to th…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2020. 230 pages. THE SETTING OF SARA MESA'S Four by Four is as intriguing as its premise. Wybrany College is a boarding school for the elite…
Toronto. Coach House Books. 2020. 160 pages. THE DELIGHT IN CLASSIFICATION in classical Japan, or perhaps the taste for precision, extended even to the aesthetic appearances of ma…