New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 179 pages]
Paolo Maurensig’s Theory of Shadows uses the game of chess as a vehicle to meditate on the Holocaust. Its central character is the infamo…
FICTION
New York. New York Review Comics. 2018. 112 pages. Comics have the unique capacity to create meaning between the verbal and visual as illustrations challenge and surprise the reader, but few comics ca…
Dallas. Deep Vellum. 2017. 384 pages. “This book is composed of three different narratives. For reasons that I do not understand, it was given to me to turn into a novel.” These words of a fictitious…
London. Pushkin Press. 2018. 92 pages. Ms Ice Sandwich is a delightful novella by Akutagawa Prize winner Mieko Kawakami (b. 1976) that asks us to join an unnamed narrator, with an obsessive i…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2018. 128 pages. Lion Cross Point is about a young boy named Takeru, vacillating between his traumatic past and present and coming uncomfortably close to the p…
Los Angeles. Dopplehouse Press. 2018. 384 pages. When, in the late nineteenth century, H. G. Wells set out to satirize capitalism, industrialization, and the Victorian class system, he chose evolution…
New York. Europa Editions. 2018. 320 pages. Disoriental is the first novel of Négar Djavadi, a screenwriter based in Paris. It travels to Djavadi’s birthplace, Iran, to tell the saga of the S…
New York. New Directions. 2018. 240 pages. Prolific Norwegian author Dag Solstad redesigns fiction in Armand V, his fourth English translation. The original subtitle, Footnotes to an Unex…
London. Peirene Press. 2018. 190 pages. Every so often, you come across a book so beautiful that you ration the pages to extend it. Nora Ikstena’s Soviet Milk is most certainly one of these.…
London. Oneworld. 2018. 387 pages. Eugene Vodolazkin’s engaging new novel opens with a mystery. The main character—Innokenty Petrovich Platonov—wakes up in a hospital ward in 1999 with no memory of wh…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 272 pages. The first entry in a planned trilogy, Mia Couto’s Woman of the Ashes is a beautiful and grotesque force interweaving history with myth. A…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2018. 308 pages. Neustadt Prize winner Dubravka Ugrešić’s latest historiographic metafiction bears her trademark erudition, wit, and nuanced cultural critiques. The f…
Milwaukee. Cissus World Press. 2017. 563 pages. Accra-born novelist and Harvard-trained lawyer Benjamin Kwakye’s recent novel, The Count’s False Banquet, is a phenomenal tale with an enchanti…
New York. Vintage Books. 2017. 401 pages. Switching between detective fiction (the Kurt Wallander series) and novels entailed risks for the late Henning Mankell. If a mystery remained at the center, d…
London. Darf. 2017. 198 pages. According to the potted bio that fills the first page of this slim volume (eighty-five pages of text, many heavy with footnotes, preceded by an introduction and an annot…
El Paso, Texas. Broken River Books. 2017. 143 pages. Chichén Itzá is a pyramid in Yucatan, Mexico, named partly for the people of Itzá who lived there. Like the ancient Mayans, to speak of Itzá…
London. Istros Books. 2017. 146 pages. In her slim novel Hair Everywhere, Croatian author Tea Tulić presents a compilation of interconnected, fragmentary prose poems that reflect how one youn…
Belgrade. Laguna. 2017. 239 pages. Renowned, awarded, and translated Serbian writer Ljubica Arsić (b. 1955) often promotes domestic and foreign women authors from past and present times. This time she…
Cairo. Hoopoe / American University in Cairo Press. 2017. 155 pages. In the poignant and humorous prose of Gaza Weddings, Palestinian poet, novelist, critic, painter, and photographer Ibrahim…
Arles. Actes Sud. 2017. 150 pages. The Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, is awarded annually in early November. The 2017 winner broke precedent by hardly qualifying as a novel.…
Los Angeles. Unnamed Press. 2017. 266 pages. Malu Halasa’s debut novel, Mother of All Pigs, is entertaining, disturbing, and educational. The author of six nonfiction books covering Syria, Ir…
Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink. 2017. 271 pages. Populated by a pantheon of established and emerging African literary figures, The Goddess of Mtwara and Other Stories boasts an array o…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2017. 108 pages. The setting of Old Rendering Plant is the German Democratic Republic in which Wolfgang Hilbig grew up. In a veritable perversion of the conven…
Easthampton, Massachusetts. Small Beer Press. 400 pages. Su Wei currently teaches Chinese language and literature at Yale University, and The Invisible Valley is his first novel available in…
New York. Atria. 2018. 224 pages. With over thirty foreign rights sales, this first novel has won the 2017 Strega, Strega Giovani, and the Prix Médicis étranger. Beyond its mountain setting and unders…