Easthampton, Massachusetts. Small Beer Press. 2018. 320 pages.
At once lyrical and experimental, stunningly original and deeply rooted in myth, the stories that make up Ambiguity Machines and Othe…
FICTION
- New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2018. 232 pages. In Kudos, Rachel Cusk continues to reinvent the genre of autofiction, seamlessly merging life and art. In this eagerly anticipated conc…
- Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2018. 203 pages. It’s no secret that graphic novels have come of age in the twenty-first century in the sense that they are now taken seriously by readers and reviewer…
- Toronto. Book*hug. 2018. 240 pages. Part domestic drama, part investigative thriller, and all intersectionality, D. Nandi Odhiambo’s fourth novel foregrounds the tension of interracial and queer relat…
- Manchester, UK. Comma Press. 2018. 196 pages. There could not be a more appropriate way to represent Riga than with a short-story collection. The Baltic nations, and Latvia certainly not least among t…
- New York. Atlantic Monthly Press. 2018. 368 pages. In writing workshops, I caution students against relying on coincidence to drive plot, as events that happen by chance are generally less interesting…
- San Francisco. Tachyon. 2018. 288 pages. The alternate history subgenre of speculative fiction, and especially alternate history written by Jewish writers, often takes the form of meditations on the r…
- New York. Knopf. 608 pages. Haruki Murakami’s massive, elegantly eerie sixteenth novel, Killing Commendatore, is a successful, surreal mashup of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, F.…
- Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern University Press. 2018. 308 pages. In Manzoor Ahtesham’s charming and thoughtful The Tale of the Missing Man, protagonist Zamir Ahmed Khan has a mysterious il…
- Arles. Actes Sud. 2018. 221 pages. Christian Garcin’s new novel puts individuals on stage who are rarely given voice in contemporary fiction. Hoyt Stapleton, Matthew McMulligan, and Steven Myers are h…
- Edinburgh. Charco Press. 2018. 226 pages. Having garnered the praise of Juan Cárdenas and Juan Villoro, young Colombian author Margarita García Robayo is being published for the first time in English…
- Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2018. 152 pages. Comemadre begins in 1907 in Buenos Aires. A doctor at a sanatorium is in love with a nurse. Other doctors are also in love with the nurse. Ot…
- New York. Akashic Books. 2018. 217 pages. In the nearly fifteen years since Akashic Books premiered its Noir anthology, the short-fiction series has examined the criminal and often perilous r…
- San Francisco. City Lights Books. 2018. 128 pages. Gabriela Alemán weaves noir, feminism, satire, and environmentalism into the strange history of Poso Wells, Ecuador. Poso Wells follows jour…
- New York. Vintage. 2018. 132 pages. It is early December and our narrator is under pressure to complete a screenplay for a sequel to his highly popular previous comedy. He and his wife and daughter ha…
- Washington, DC. Gallaudet University Press. 2018. 221 pages. Sister and Brother chronicles the lives of Albert and Helena Berg, siblings from an affluent family of musicians in nineteenth-cen…
- New York. W. W. Norton. 2018. 502 pages. Approximately one-third of the way through Richard Powers’s The Overstory, a scientist whose findings had originally been attacked discovers that she…
- Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2018. 160 pages. Jérôme Ruillier’s The Strange is the timely, and timeless, story of a fictional undocumented immigrant’s struggle to make a new life. Through…
- Cape Town. Kwela Books. 2018. 207 pages. Niq Mhlongo’s new short-story collection begins in Soweto’s Avalon Cemetery. The narrator goes to find her absent father’s grave, superstitiously hoping that i…
- Hong Kong. Signal 8 Press. 2018. 190 pages. In Insignificance, Xu Xi ambitiously claimed that she was doing a little bit of what Dream of the Red Chamber was doing—to create classic…
- Simsbury, Connecticut. Mandel Vilar Press. 2018. 320 pages. Zion’s Fiction is a project many years in the making, but it was worth the wait. In this collection, readers will find a wealth of…
- Albuquerque, New Mexico. World Weaver Press. 2018. 286 pages. Solarpunk is the third installment in a triptych including Vaporpunk and Dieselpunk, all edited by Brazilian sc…
- Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2018. 478 pages. One expects a thick novel to be expansive in theme or epically cover a great deal of time and territory, but lately several mysteries, especially in translat…
- New York. Other Press. 2018. 240 pages. Amid a midlife crisis, Karolina Andersson knows her “pathetic” life must change so she can face the end of the day—eventide. A tenured art history professor at…
- New York. Archipelago. 2018. 120 pages. It was the very day Nazi Germany launched their assault on Poland—September 1, 1939—that the Dutch writer Willem Frederik Hermans turned eighteen. Within a year…