Santa Rosa, California. WTAW Press. 2019. 184 pages.
The fifty-two short stories in Like Water by Russian author Olga Zilberbourg illustrate protagonists trying to stay afloat. In her Englis…
FICTION
Bogotá. Seix Barral/Planeta. 2019. 621 pages. Much ink is spent on bidding the Great Latin American Novel, speciously fused with “total novels.” Vargas Llosa and Bolaño wrote them outrightly, while ol…
Alfaguara. 2019. 265 pages. Argentine writer and literary critic Patricio Pron won the prestigious Alfaguara Prize for 2019 with Mañana tendremos otros nombres, a novel that examines relatio…
Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2019. 1020 pages. Ducks, Newburyport opens with a quiet moment of motherhood: a lioness contemplating the awareness of her cubs and the absolute necessity of he…
Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2019. 251 pages. The characters in Dead Heat, the debut novel by Hungarian author Benedek Totth, are absolute monsters. They are cruel in word and deed, and when…
Norfolk, United Kingdom. Salt Publishing. 213 pages. The fourteen stories in this provocative collection critique postmodern culture, whose social hierarchies and commodity capitalism, fed by “blood…
Chennai, India. Westland Books. 2019. 184 pages. The publication of the 2013 novel The House with a Thousand Stories announced the arrival of Aruni Kashyap as a new voice in the burgeoning o…
Toronto. Inkyard Press. 2019. 422 pages. In their debut novel, Dear Haiti, Love Alaine, co-authors Maika and Maritza Moulite craft a mosaic of modern-day Haiti that simultaneously exploits an…
Ed. Raph Cormack. Manchester, UK. Comma Press. 2019. 144 pages. It is not often that Western audiences have the opportunity to delve into an anthology of contemporary Egyptian fiction; a book that tra…
New York. Europa Editions. 2020. 245 pages. Shokoofeh Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree is an astoundingly imaginative work of fiction with deep roots in Persian culture. The n…
Raleigh, North Carolina. Regal House. 2019. 206 pages. In this masterful collection of short stories, characters from urban Nairobi and rural villages burst into life in bold, expressionistic strokes,…
Paris. Grasset. 2019. 377 pages. Laurent Binet’s last novel, La septième fonction du langage (2015), was an elaborate, cleverly constructed satire of the postmodernist period and many of its…
New York. Harper Voyager. 2020. 304 pages. “No good deed goes unpunished”: rarely has an aphorism been so vividly rendered in fiction. But Daughter from the Dark doesn’t just offer readers an…
Weston, Florida. Katakana Editores. 2020. 126 pages. Near the end of Alberto Chimal’s The Most Fragile Objects, Latour, one of the protagonists, tries, much like all enlightened tyrants, to w…
New York. Bloomsbury. 2020. 512 pages. For all its strange science, clairvoyance, and electrical ghosts, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow presents a nineteenth century remarkably analogous to…
New York. William Morrow. 2020. 195 pages. An author who wishes to recall a history known to his parents, but outside his own experience, often has a hard time getting it right. He may brim with overc…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 224 pages. In a four-decade career as a crooked Buenos Aires businessman, the protagonist of K. Ferrari’s Like Flies from Afar has harmed and humil…
Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2020. 342 pages. One of Pascale Quiviger’s narrators calls “love” a “hole punched in reality”; though from an earlier novel, it aptly describes the situation in If Yo…
Trans. Bill Johnston. Bloomington. Indiana University Press. 2019. 203 pages. In the Republic of Vietongo, life is a perpetual schism. The setting of Alain Mabanckou’s most recently translated novel,…
New York. Tor Books. 2019. 352 pages. Supernova Era is the fifth novel by Chinese sci-fi author Cixin Liu to come out in English translation since 2014, and this doesn’t even include the coll…
Frankfurt am Main. Schöffling. 2019. 250 pages. Berit Glanz is one of Germany’s brightest young stars. In a year where young novelists are dominating prize lists, including the German Book Award short…
New York. Grove Press. 2019. 576 pages. Most novels about Palestine focus on the events following the Nakba (the catastrophe, in Arabic) of 1948. Isabella Hammad chooses to focus on the neglected pre-…
New York. HarperVia. 2019. 387 pages. Sometimes a novel stands out less for its content and more for its very existence. Such a novel is Lost in the Spanish Quarter, by Heddi Goodrich, which…
New York. Bellevue Literary Press. 2019. 208 pages. The invisible butler did it. That’s the high-concept vision of Spanish novelist Juan José Millás’s quirky, dark comedy From the Shadows. T…
Dallas, Texas. Deep Vellum. 2019. 176 pages. In her second novel translated into English, Dorota Masłowska sets her sights on societal decay under capitalism and consumer culture. Joanne and Farah ar…