New York. Overlook Press. 2016. 300 pages.
Despite being ever-evolving, the culture of beauty is one that looks similar across the ages. The details change from century to century, yet throughout time…
FICTION
London. Peter Owen / Istros Books. 2016. 200 pages. This deeply engaging work traces the intersection of the narrator—a stand-in for the Slovenian author—with other wandering souls encountered across…
New York. Europa Editions. 2016. 259 pages. Parisa Reza’s novel The Gardens of Consolation takes us into the lives of an Iranian couple, Sardar and Talla, from their youth to their middle ag…
New York. W.W. Norton. 2016. 473 pages. Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, Do Not Say We Have Nothing is Madeleine Thien’s third novel. The story follows a family in China during the…
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The Doomed City. Chicago Review Press. 2016. 462 pages. The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn. Melville House. 2015. 238 pages. A Soviet astronomer from the 1950s. A Nazi. An American profes…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2016. 148 pages. We need a new word to describe a book like Normal. “Novel” doesn’t quite cut it, because as a novel (or any of its length-centric denomin…
Comma Press. 2016. 182 pages. Iraq + 100 envisions the political and psychological consequences of the occupation a century into Iraq’s future. Written by authors of diverse ages and backgrou…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter Books. 2017. 500 pages. Life or death? Dream or reality? Antoine Volodine destroys these binaries with the force of a nuclear meltdown, much like those that (in the no…
Sacramento, California. Snuggly Books. 2017. 110 pages. Vessel and Solsvart is a collection of five short stories, all dark fantasies dealing with the fine line between life and death. Norweg…
New York. Other Press. 2017. 432 pages. Truth be told, Malin Persson Giolito’s fourth novel, Quicksand, is an indictment of the zeitgeist. Victor Hugo called quicksand “a pit of mire in a cav…
Brooklyn. Restless Books. 2017. 240 pages. Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People is a riveting debut collection of twenty-eight short stories written in a mélange of stylistic registers. Fic…
Budapest. Kossuth. 2016. 203 pages. Tamás Vekerdy, one of Hungary’s top educationalists and founder of the Waldorf Schools in his native country, is also an impressive writer. His early literary work…
Paris. Gallimard. 2016. 176 pages. Scholastique Mukasonga, whose family was destroyed in the Rwandan genocide and who won a prestigious prize for the novel Notre-Dame du Nil (2012), now has…
Paris. P.O.L. 2016. 272 pages. The narrator of Gérard Gavarry’s latest book, Leucate Univers, is anonymous. All that is initially made known about him is that he is eager to learn about the…
Trans. Jerry Pinto. New York. The New Press. 2016. 240 pages. The entrance of an unknown stranger who radically impacts the lives of other characters is a commonly used fictional device. Consider Paso…
Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2016. 393 pages. There is nothing more profound than the realization of what war does well beyond its official end. Peter Bush has given us a poetic translation of Emili…
New York. Viking. 2016. 462 pages. In June 1922 the charming Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is tried in Moscow and found guilty; this verdict opens Amor Towles’s engaging new novel. Rather than being s…
Greenville, South Carolina. KBR. 2016. 217 pages. Western literature is full of accounts of vagrancy and tales of the flâneur. So why would we need yet another? Wolfgang Hermann’s Paris Berlin New…
Goa, India. Under the Peepal Tree. 2016. 192 pages. Perspectives: An Anthology of Telugu Short Stories is a collection of nineteen short stories by as many authors (sixteen men and three wome…
Brooklyn. Melville House. 2016. 582 pages. As if on an unseasonable night, reading a Calvino novel, the reader is addressed in the first chapter. He or she is pictured in a fully furnished hotel room…
Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2016. 153 pages. The unnamed narrator of Antonio Moresco’s Distant Light is uncommonly attuned to the natural world. Fleeing from his past for reasons that are ne…
Bloomington. Indiana University Press. 2016. 78 pages. The unnamed narrator of Wilfried N’Sondé’s novella The Heart of the Leopard Children describes his wretched and brutal experience in a F…
New York. Tor. 2016. 608 pages. Death’s End concludes Cixin Liu’s trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past, which began with the multiple-award-winning The Three-Body Problem (2…
Toronto. Coach House Books. 2016. 232 pages. In his latest novel, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner André Alexis crafts a complex tale of family, addiction, and mystery that reflects a diverse vision of…
New York. Penguin Books. 2016. 101 pages. Alejandro Zambra is a comprehensive reader of Bolaño and Perec, and surely of Natalia Ginzburg and Cesare Pavese, although he says one is dumb if worried abou…