New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 2017. 333 pages.
Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War, envisions a twenty-first-century United States that has been literally and figuratively reshaped by such…
FICTION
- Boston. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2017. 312 pages. For a debut novel, Salt Houses is a sophisticated one with an interesting plot and well-developed characters. It deals with one of the worl…
- Sweden. l’Aleph. 2017. 112 pages. Vis & I is a love story but also, or even more so, a story of soul searching. An allusion to Vis & Ramin, an eleventh-century Persian epic l…
- New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2017. 528 pages. This rich and brilliant evocation of Jewish history will only burnish the already extraordinary reputation of the author of the acclaimed The…
- New York. Europa Editions. 2017. 150 pages. Domenico Starnone is the author of more than a dozen literary works of fiction in his native Italy, and thanks to Europa Editions in the United States, we a…
- Sacramento, California. Snuggly Books. 2017. 164 pages. Prolific Welsh author Rhys Hughes is thoroughly wrung out. While Wales is not quite the wettest place on earth, it sure comes close. In his late…
- London. Tilted Axis Press. 2017. 189 pages. A schoolgirl struggling to see why one plus one equals two; a bus passenger writing with unusually large gaps between sentences; a young couple being too fo…
- Madrid. Alfaguara. 2017. 216 pages. Ray Loriga, born Jorge Loriga Torrenova in Madrid in 1967, has garnered the 2017 Alfaguara Novel Prize for Rendición (Surrender), an engaging, thought-prov…
- San Francisco. Tachyon. 2017. 336 pages. The New Voices of Fantasy, edited by Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman, promises the reader exposure to the next generation of fantasy writers. These…
- Prague. Twisted Spoon Press. 2017. 220 pages. Aberrant is a deliberately paced novel. Dealing as it does in sensory description, the narrative is by turns immaculately beautiful and incredibl…
- New York. Tor. 2017. 112 pages. American history is an atlas of the psychocultural scars that transformed indigenous people’s autochthonous relations with the land into the measured/measurable marks o…
- Cairo. Hoopoe / American University in Cairo Press. 2017. 129 pages. Sinan Antoon’s novel, Baghdad Eucharist, translated by Maia Tabet, originally published in Arabic by Al-Kamel Publishers a…
- Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 120 pages. The Balkan Wars spawned literature across genres, in languages from émigré English and German to nascent Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian. But Spomenka Štimec’s “f…
- New York. Knopf. 2017. 272 pages. For over two decades, Orhan Pamuk has given us the courage to remember the distant and the recent past, in signifiers and colors invisible before. That is why it is n…
- Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2017. 144 pages. A mandala is the product of an integrated art; a mandala is made to map the cosmos. But the cosmos comes in many shapes and sizes. Antonio Tabucchi, in hi…
- New York. Other Press. 2017 (© 2016). 446 pages. This novel, originally published serially in Japan’s largest newspaper, begins with two middle-aged Japanese sisters discussing the money left behind b…
- New York. New Directions. 2017. 320 pages. In her latest novel, Go, Went, Gone, Jenny Erpenbeck, 2018 Puterbaugh Fellow, addresses the current refugee crisis that has had far-reaching politic…
- Nottingham, United Kingdom. Noir Press. 2016. 183 pages. Epilepsy and psychosis, depression and lust, aging, poverty, betrayal, violence, and the mystery of the human spirit—beset, struggling, breakin…
- London. Fitzcarraldo Editions. 2016 (©2013). 672 pages. The phrase “bricks and mortar” refers to the real estate in an east German city, Meyer’s Leipzig, which is likewise the setting for his earlier…
- Madrid. Hispabooks. 2016. 810 pages. Invoking a mystique of the real in the tradition of Another Country, L’Éducation sentimentale, and Ulysses, Ramon Saizarbitoria has writ…
- Frankfurt am Main. Westend Verlag. 2016. 349 pages. To be taken seriously, a political thriller must persuade its readers that the exciting fiction has been constructed around knowing—perhaps dangerou…
- Paris. Gallimard. 2016. 226 pages. The novel that won the prestigious Goncourt Prize in 2016 begins on a grim note: “The baby is dead.” Most of the ensuing narrative is recounted in the form of an ext…
- Victoria, Texas. Dalkey Archive Press. 2017. 105 pages. The central concept of Bodies of Summer is a good one: what if, after death, your consciousness uploaded to the Internet, where you cou…
- Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink Books. 2017. 288 pages. In Jana Fawaz Elhassan’s first translated novel, she explores the entwinement of passion and affection with despair and anger through chil…
- Ljouwert, Netherlands. Het Nieuwe Kanaal. 2016. 274 pages. In his eighties now, Durk van der Ploeg shows little evidence that he’s losing his literary touch. His latest, De lêste floed (The…