Victoria, Texas. Dalkey Archive Press. 2017. 204 pages.
Vedrana Rudan’s new provocatrice, Tilda (unnamed until the penultimate chapter), recalls the protagonist of her first novel, Night, bot…
FICTION
Portland, Oregon. Tin House Books. 2017. 336 pages. Taking on James Joyce is no small feat, but Ruth Gilligan pulls it off masterfully in her own distinctive voice while sprinkling in Samuel Beckett,…
Kraków. Wydawnictwo Literackie. 2016. 428 pages. The year is 1937. For nearly twenty years, Poland has been independent after a century and a half of foreign occupation. As Hitler casts an ever-longe…
New York. Vertical Comics. 2017. 174 pages. Dissolving Classroom is the sixth volume to translate Japanese mangaka Junji Ito’s probing visions of the horrifying and the weird into En…
New York. New Vessel Press. 2017. 200 pages. Moving the Palace won both the François Mauriac Prize from the Académie Française and the Prix Tropiques, so one opens its pages with high expecta…
Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2017. 110 pages. Camanchaca is a thick fog often seen along certain parts of the Chilean coast. Pushed along by the winds coming off the Pacific Ocean, it oft…
Tunis. Elyzad. 2016. 283 pages. Daoud Kaci / Dawood Casey is a person displaced by his thirst for independence and the rigors of French colonial rule. From Tunis to Palermo, New York, and the 1918 bat…
New York. New Directions. 2017. 96 pages. At his very finest, Osama Alomar is heir to Kahlil Gibran, whom he greatly admires, by way of the surrealists. Despite their apparent playful wit, Alomar’s d…
New York. New Vessel Press. 2017. 245 pages. In his second novel, Sergei Lebedev explores the thrills and failures of the late Soviet Union through the eyes of a young boy. Both a coming-of-age story…
New York. Black Cat. 2017 (©2016). 490 pages. This is a remarkable book, truly brilliant, whose 490 pages is initially intimidating, but reading it is as pleasurable as binge-watching a miniseries or…
New York. Soho Press. 2017. 291 pages. In Savage Theories, Pola Oloixarac addresses the conflict of being both an individual with ideas and a social animal with libido. Theory and sexuality a…
Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink Books. 2017. 252 pages. Mustafa Khalifa’s debut effort, The Shell, is difficult to stomach. It is also undoubtedly necessary. A fictional account that e…
New York. Henry Holt. 2017. 866 pages. Is it an indulgence to resist the arbitrariness of having only one life to live? Rather than lodge one’s alternative paths in a variety of characters in differen…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2017. 231 pages. Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel explores the tender and tenuous relationship between Nadia and Saeed, young adults coming of age during a time of strife in the…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2017. 470 pages. Frontier, first published in China in 2008, is Can Xue’s follow-up to her novel The Last Lover, winner of the 2015 Best Translated…
Dallas, Texas. Deep Vellum. 2017. 312 pages. It is difficult to find the right genre to capture Klougart’s sixth publication, Of Darkness (WLT, Jan. 2017, 53–55). Perhaps people have…
Anadarko, Oklahoma. Hosstyle. 2016. 387 pages. In The Last Pow-Wow, by That Native Thomas and Steven Paul Judd, a Native American baby is born with powwow regalia growing out of his skin. Fe…
Barcelona. Acantilado. 2016. 373 pages. La última hermana, the latest novel by Chilean Jorge Edwards, is a compelling story about the cruelty of war but also of a courage born of human compas…
Santiago de Chile. Plaza Janés. 2015. 131 pages. Those who know about literature know that what is easy to read is almost always difficult to write. That is the case of the work of the Chilean author…
Madrid. Alfaguara. 2016. 223 pages. The continuing polemic about this novel’s publication confirms that it hardly matters whether it disappoints professors fretful about pre/ur-texts, or faithful Robe…
Seattle. Chin Music Press. 2016. 220 pages. Set in the 1960s, White Elephant follows the lives of sisters Hiroko and Sakiko, two of the four daughters of Japanese business magnate Morimasa Mo…
Madrid. Siruela. 2016. 182 pages. Rosa Montero says in La loca de la casa that novelists can be classified into two types: the hedgehogs (erizos), the ones who always come back almos…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2016. 195 pages. Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut novel, Pond, follows an unnamed young woman who takes up residence in a village on Ireland’s west coast. Initially re…
Manchester. Comma Press. 2016. 164 pages. To call The Book of Dhaka overdue is an understatement, given the dearth of translations of contemporary writers working in the Bangla language, whic…
Astoria, New York. The Mantle. 2016. 221 pages. The Sound of Things to Come, a novel in eight apparently unlinked stories, portrays educated urban Nigerians. Its context external realities du…