New York. Ballantine. 2019. 317 pages.
Originally published in Canada in 2016, The Beekeeper of Aleppo follows a couple fleeing the destruction of the Syrian war to Turkey and Greece as they…
FICTION
Oakland, California. Transit Books. 2019. 150 pages. Gabriela Ybarra grew up in death’s shadow. Before she was born, her grandfather was kidnapped and executed by Basque separatists. When she was youn…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2019. 180 pages. A novelist once said that writers come in two types. One is the storyteller, whose art originates in folklore and the oral tradition and whose work…
New York. Other Press. 2019. 192 pages. Compact, thought-provoking, and gently exquisite, Labyrinth, the fourth novel by Turkish author Burhan Sönmez, quietly establishes him as one of Europ…
Montréal. Mémoire d’encrier. 2019. 166 pages. The age of Louis XIV conjures images of pomp and splendor, court intrigues and trickeries, loose morals and scabrous adventures, ribaldry and chivalry. In…
Toronto. Arachnide Editions. 2019. 192 pages. Quebecoise author Audrée Wilhelmy’s third novel chronicles the Borya family’s experiences in fictional Sitjaq’s rugged terrain. Unexpected intimacies erup…
Beijing. People’s Literature Publishing House. 2018. 1,039 pages. Ying Wu Xiong (Brother Yingwu), Li Er’s latest novel, won the 2019 Mao Dun Literature Prize in China. In the afterword, Li sa…
New York. Scribner. 2019. 320 pages. David Livingstone was a household name to late nineteenth-century Brits. His story was one of colonialist triumph, of British imperial masculinity’s simultaneous l…
Manchester, UK. Comma Press. 2019. 222 pages. The twelve stories in Palestine +100 present radically different visions of Palestine in 2048. Technology dominates, particularly virtual realit…
New York. Liveright. 2019. 417 pages. We meet The Capital’s main characters in a central Brussels plaza where they are trying to get out of the way of a runaway pig creating havoc. Pigs are a…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2019. 359 pages. War is not pleasant to read about. If, by some chance, you should ever forget that, it may be time to pick up Until Stones Become Li…
New York. Columbia University Press. 2019. 282 pages. Wang Anyi has already been recognized as one of the most influential contemporary Chinese authors and has recently received increased scholarly at…
Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2019. 160 pages. Jakarta (Yakarta in the original Spanish) is a taut novel set in an unnamed city beset by plague and social unrest, where Mesoameri…
Atlanta. Meerkat Press. 2019. 100 pages. Kaaron Warren relives her fascination with ghosts and, like every great writer, steals her stories from the everyday. But nothing is everyday in where she tak…
New York. Catapult. 2019. 257 pages. Humiliation, Paulina Flores’s debut collection of short stories, beautifully translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, is a timely work that provides…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2019. 278 pages. Johannes Anyuru turns sturm und drang into elegant speculative fiction in his novel They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears. Publish…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2019. 545 pages. In Rodrigo Fresán’s The Dreamed Part, one of his book-besotted characters spends many hours rereading a single story, a “mad and wise” tale…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 288 pages. Literary criticism nowadays tends to walk the line between aesthetic and political judgment, but when it comes to the novels of Michel Houellebec…
Paris. Gallimard. 2019. 144 pages. This short novel from the 2014 Nobel Prize laureate covers familiar themes of evanescent recollection and impossible forgetting. Encre sympathique, or invis…
New York. Bloomsbury. 2019. 320 pages. The tale of Tequila Leila begins with an end. The first page of Elif Shafak’s new novel, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, finds Leila in a…
New York. Penguin Random House. 2019. 416 pages. Salman Rushdie, the much-celebrated as well as vilified Indian-born British author of the novels Midnight’s Children and The Sata…
London. Saqi Books. 2019. 87 pages. When Egyptian critic and noted journalist Mohamed Shoair uncovered a collection of never-before-seen stories by Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, he labeled the discov…
London. Fitzcarraldo Editions. 2019. 131 pages. In January of this year, I had the pleasure of meeting Carlos Manuel Álvarez in Havana. We met at Café Fortuna Joe, a hipstery coffee house in Playa, a…
London. Oneworld. 2019. 197 pages. Thanks to Oneworld, readers of English now have the opportunity to experience the widely successful first novel of the Lithuanian actor, director, and poet Alvydas…
New York. Dottir Press. 2019. 271 pages. Please Read This Leaflet Carefully is the interior monologue of Laura Fjellstad, a young woman made old by decades of chronic pain. Told in reverse ch…