Hamburg. Edition Nautilus. 2018. 256 pages.
Die Tankstelle von Courcelles (The petrol station of courcelles) is the latest offering from German novelist Matthias Wittekindt. As a prequel to t…
FICTION
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2019. 240 pages. Hungarian author Zsófia Bán (b. 1957, Rio de Janeiro) fashioned the curious frame of a “night school” to instruct her readers on a long list of rando…
New York. Viking. 2019. 304 pages. Monique Truong chose “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” a line from Emily Dickinson, as the epigraph for her provocative third novel, The Sweetest Fruits…
Brighton, Massachusetts. Academic Studies Press. 2018. 316 pages. Farewell, Aylis incorporates three novellas from Azerbaijani author Akram Aylisli, namely Yemen, Stone Dreams…
Mexico City. Planeta. 2019. 248 pages. In 2015 the Independent reported that the United States Treasury Department had sanctioned more businesses for money laundering in Guadalajara—our south…
Montreal. QC Fiction. 2019. 400 pages. In this dark coming-of-age novel, the odds are stacked against the protagonist, Émile Claudel, who gives us the story of his life from birth to age eighteen. Th…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2019. 212 pages. Flowers of Mold, Mouthful of Birds, Apple and Knife, The Night Circus, Alphaland, Mars—these are just a…
Cairo. Hoopoe Press. 2019. 269 pages. It is easy to fall in love with Beirut—the blue Mediterranean shimmers in the evening and the joie de vivre of the Lebanese charms visitors. But, as one of our Le…
New York. New Directions. 2019. 576 pages. It is revealing to consider why this book fails so spectacularly—especially given the sustained astonishment László Krasznahorkai’s previous novels evoke, n…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 336 pages. The narrator of Tash Aw’s latest novel, We, the Survivors, is an ethnically Hokkien Chinese Malaysian man called Lee Hock Lye—known to h…
Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2019. 428 pages. Adam Dannoun, a melancholic Palestinian self-exiled in New York and the protagonist-narrator of Children of the Ghetto, suffers from li…
Pasadena, California. Red Hen Press. 2019. 272 pages. The island, from a distance, looks like almost anything other than what it actually is: a place where the world’s detritus washes up, a place wher…
New York. Tor. 2019. 272 pages. Sometimes readers just can’t let go. They are so in love with a character, a story cycle, or a fictional world that when the original author moves on to other books (or…
Melbourne. Scribe. 2019. 345 pages. In a note at the beginning of Among the Lost, Emiliano Monge thanks the human rights organizations that provided him with inspiration. Throughout the nove…
Noida, U.P. Simon & Schuster India. 2019. 322 pages. In her latest novel, I Have Become the Tide, Indian author Githa Hariharan reminds the world that caste exists, despite many of her co…
New York. Europa Editions. 2019. 170 pages. In Ann Goldstein’s wonderful translation of Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s The Girl Returned, the first image we have of the protagonist is of her s…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 546 pages. Jacob’s Ladder is an ambitious family saga that encompasses six generations and alternates between two plotlines. The book describes the…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 320 pages. Amitav Ghosh’s latest novel, Gun Island, traces familiar crosscultural patterns evident in his earlier novels. There are journeys by lan…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2019. 448 pages. Maaza Mengiste’s latest novel, The Shadow King, not only adds to the current outpouring of contemporary African women writers, it also demon…
London. Linen Press. 2019. 302 pages. Mona Dash’s debut memoir, A Roll of the Dice, is an odyssey of an invincible mother who, despite her best efforts, loses her firstborn son diagn…
Paris. Pierre-Guillaume de Roux. 2019. 302 pages. After a novel written in English, The Pleasures of Queuing (2018), Erik Martiny has produced a French-language novel that is somewhat similar…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 240 pages. Commencing Leaving the Atocha Station with a sharp gesture, novelist Ben Lerner puts all his narrative and descriptive responsibilities a…
New York. Catapult. 2019. 224 pages. One doesn’t have to see the carved face of the Grand Canyon to know water is powerful and mysterious but also beautiful. It is this combination of danger and poet…
New York. Other Press. 2019. 336 pages. In his wry but uneven second novel, Joost de Vries kills off his most interesting character almost immediately. Josip Brik—famed historian and “generalissimo”…
South Pasadena, California. Semiotext(e). 2018. 240 pages. Heike Geissler would like to be “a person who is what she does,” but her writing and translating work pays too little to buy the occasional e…