Paris. Spinelle. 2023. 146 pages.
With his unique style, imbued with seriousness and humor, the French-Swedish writer Claude Kayat’s most recent novel, La voix du terroriste, deals wi…
FICTION
New York. New York Review Books. 2023. 254 pages. W the Whore consists of three graphic novels originally published in Germany in 2001, 2003, and 2007 and now considered a classic in…
New York. Archipelago. 2023. 102 pages. Since the mid-1990s, renowned Peruvian writer Augusto Higa Oshiro (b. 1946) has interrogated through his literature what it means to be a nisei…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 331 pages. Aleksandar Hemon’s brilliant new novel tells the harrowing tale of its Sarajevan protagonist, Rafael (Rafe) Pinto. A homosexual,…
Berkeley. Counterpoint. 2023. 208 pages. Maru Ayase (b. 1986) is a well-established author with numerous novels under her belt, but the work under review is her first to be translated…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2023. 368 pages. The information revolution brings a new round of human alienation, and the existential crisis becomes more apparent. In her timely novel Girlf…
New York. Doubleday. 2023. 240 pages. Julie Schumacher first introduced us to Jason Fitger, the middle-aged, disgruntled creative writing professor at Payne University, and writer of…
London. Seagull Books. 2022. 388 pages. Gábor Vida is a Transylvanian Hungarian writer of distinction. His novel Egy dadogás története was first published in 2017 and received rave re…
Leeds, UK. Peepal Tree Press. 2023. 196 pages. Longing doesn’t just make the heart grow fonder. Desire makes it grow in every direction and back again. We look beneath rocks, pursue c…
New York. Europa. 2023. 336 pages. Catherine Chidgey’s Pet is a powerful novel about eroding innocence, contagious intolerance, and duplicitous authority figures. The story, set in 19…
New York. Knopf. 2023. 352 pages. The phrase “that’s just what you do,” spoken by the protagonist’s mother in part 1 of Ayobami Adebayo’s A Spell of Good Things, takes on layers of me…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 256 pages. Mozambican writer Mia Couto concludes his Sands of the Emperor trilogy with The Drinker of Horizons, again translated from Portug…
New York. Liveright. 2023. 166 pages. In music, when one wants to sound impressive, it’s best to play something fast; prestissimo gets the audience’s pulse up. If what is desired, how…
Prague. Karolinum Press. 2022. 110 pages. Much has been written on the horrifying abuses of justice in the former Soviet Union and in most countries of the Communist bloc, but relatively little specif…
New York. Other Press. 2022. 419 pages. Anyone who’s been to a large family gathering has heard memories turned into stories, stories in which the teller has enlarged on the known facts. We appreciate…
Frankfurt am Main. CEEOLPress. 2022. 400 pages. This novel is terrifying. Hungarian writer Gábor Zoltán, after a great deal of archival research, has created a nightmarish recounting of events from th…
Syracuse, New York. Syracuse University Press. 2022. 623 pages. Alexandrian-born novelist Reem Bassiouney has steadily been establishing herself as one of the freshest voices in Arabic literature with…
Changsha. Hunan Literature & Art Publishing House. 2022. 396 pages. Ru He Shi Hao (What to Be) is Yan Zhen’s fifth novel, published eight years after his last one, Huo Zhe Zhi Shang (Above Being A…
New York. Columbia University Press. 2022. 168 pages. The first novel of its kind to have escaped suppression, The Backstreets is a harrowing vision of the experience of the Uyghurs, an ethnic group s…
New York. Open Letter. 2022. 208 pages. In this collection of quietly penetrating short stories, Spanish writer Sara Mesa tells the tales of ordinary people and wrinkles their daily monotony with aber…
New York. Ballantine Books. 2022. 237 pages. Blitz Bazawule’s debut novel, The Scent of Burnt Flowers, is an evocative journey through America and Ghana of the 1960s. Bazawule is an award-winning visu…
Berlin. Aufbau. 2022. 179 pages. This enchanting fiction debut centers around Nelli, a woman who emigrated in the 1990s from the former Soviet Union as a child and was raised by her grandmother in a s…
Brooklyn. Spuyten Duyvil. 2023. 294 pages. Three times I knocked on the door at 12 rue des Juifs. I waited. The courtyard still. From steep wooden stairs leading to the ramparts, a cat hissed at me. I…
Portland, Oregon. Tin House. 2022. 296 pages. When Ramón, the gentle Chilean at the center of María José Ferrada’s dreamlike novel, climbs a billboard and sets up a mattress on the elevated platform i…
London. Istros Books. 2023. 143 pages. Curvaceous and wearing pink, the old bomb on the cover of Balkan Bombshells has sparked a debate more explosive than the mostly quiet stories it contains. As exp…