London. Sceptre Books. 2018. 517 pages.
Icelandic author Sjón’s masterful tome CoDex 1962 is now available in English translation—and this is cause to celebrate. The work is in three parts, i…
FICTION
Montreal. Baraka Books. 2018. 96 pages. Yannis Tsirbas’s Vic City Express, which was previously shortlisted for the Greek National Literature Award in 2013, is a small book that throws a very…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 345 pages. Heroism in journalism seems to be one of the major themes of our time, and by almost any standard, Roberto Saviano is one of the most heroic. His…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2018. 240 pages. It would do a disservice to Children of God to say it merely focuses on something as clichéd and simplistic as light versus dark, yet at the same…
New York. Europa Editions. 2018. 128 pages. The orange in the title of Iwaki Kei’s stunning debut novel, Farewell, My Orange, does not refer to the citrus fruit. It is the brilliant color of…
London. Pushkin Press. 2017. 416 pages. Reading Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen’s novel Secret Passages in a Hillside Town is like wandering a dreamlike labyrinth. The book garnered the 2011 Kuvast…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 144 pages. Early in Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall, the narrator, a smart seventeen-year-old named Silvie, recalls accompanying her father to a history mus…
London. Norvik Press (Ingram, distr.). 2018. 241 pages. Estonian is a language that does not translate well to English. An approximate hybrid of Finnish and Russian, Estonian sentence structure, tone…
Brooklyn. Melville House. 2018. 208 pages. Betrayal, at all levels, is the essence of Revolution Sunday by Wendy Guerra. Cloe, a novelist and poet, is betrayed at all levels, from all direct…
London. Fitzcarraldo. 2018. 153 pages. Ever since Karl Ove Knausgaard published the first volume of My Struggle, international attention has equated much of the modern Norwegian novel with h…
Paris. Actes Sud. 2018. 301 pages. Les Nuits d’Ava is Thierry Froger’s second novel, after Sauve qui peut (la révolution), also published by Actes Sud. The title was derived from Jea…
London. Pushkin Press. 2018. 157 pages. The Cake Tree in the Ruins is a collection of short stories from Japanese author Akiyuki Nosaka. Famous for the short story from which the Studio Ghi…
London. Fitzcarraldo. 2018. 272 pages. From the opening chapter of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, we already know that the aging protagonist, Janina Dusezjko, ha…
Trans. Helen Stevenson. New York. Soft Skull Press. 2018. 176 pages. Last year, Black Moses stood as a testament to Alain Mabanckou’s literary prowess, positing a journey of growth amid the g…
Edinburgh. Charco Press. 2018. 154 pages. In Resistance, Julián Fuks explores how the horror of life under an oppressive government—in this case, the military dictatorship in 1970s Argentina…
New York. New Directions. 2018. 144 pages. Although there were many intellectual currents, social and political upheavals spanning over four centuries that shaped the contours of the European Renaissa…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2018. 223 pages. The notion of a modern Frankenstein is far from unique. With Desirable Body, however, Hubert Haddad crafts a mesmerizi…
Budapest. Magvetö. 260 pages. Ernö Szív is the pseudonym of László Darvasi, one of Hungary’s best fiction writers. Darvasi has published over two dozen books under his name, intermittently with the “E…
Belgrade. Laguna. 2018. 389 pages. Svetlana Slapšak, an award-winning essayist and candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, has followed up her acclaimed debut novel, Ravnoteža (Equilibri…
Chicago. Swan Isle Press. 2018. 177 pages. Roberto Ransom’s openings are not just that. The first story in Missing Persons is about a pet lizard grown big enough to devour its adoptive family…
New Delhi. Aleph. 2018. 261 pages. Missing, Sumana Roy’s first novel after her highly acclaimed first work of nonfiction, is a modern retelling of the oldest Hindu epic, the Ramayana…
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Paris. Editions de l’Herne. 2017. 68 pages. Paris. Editions de l’Herne. 2017. 342 pages. In the French literary world, publication in the Pléiade amounts to canonization of an author for the genera…
Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink Books. 2018 (©2016). 283 pages. “Go on, pour,” Yasmin says as she has Abu Azab cauterize the leg of a rebel soldier with scalding hot oil after she has amputated…
Los Angeles. DoppelHouse Press. 2018. 224 pages. Malva, the debut work of Dutch poet-turned-novelist Hagar Peeters, had my commitment by page 6; for serious students of Chilean poet Pablo Ner…
Brooklyn, New York. Restless Books. 2018. 209 pages. To catalog the atrocities carried out in Emiliano Monge’s The Arid Sky is to be reminded that humanity will never run out of ways to infli…