Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2016. 128 pages.
A Greater Music is another addition to a growing body of literature that explores the idea that human sexuality is more pliable and fluid th…
FICTION
Dallas, Texas. Deep Vellum. 2016. 176 pages. One Hundred Twenty-One Days, the debut novel by mathematician and Oulipo member Michèle Audin, is truly the sum of its parts. Each of the chapters…
Victoria, Texas. Dalkey Archive Press. 2016. 248 pages. Can horrific psychic wounds from wartime ever really heal? Can one merely will oneself to forget? These are the major themes explored in this ne…
Oakland, California. PM Press. 2016. 274 pages. It is said that historians provide accuracy while artists provide truth, which can be best illustrated by the novel Damnificados. According to…
Norman, Oklahoma. University of Oklahoma Press. 2016. 338 pages. The Mexican Flyboy reads like a surrealist dream: it is a fairy tale for adults, a novel where clairvoyant superheroes (Mandra…
Madrid. Alfaguara. 2016. 314 pages. Mario Vargas Llosa’s latest novel is as much a psychological thriller as it is a compelling portrait of power and corruption in Peru’s recent political history. Set…
New York. Verso Books. 2016. 164 pages. Zeno Hintermeier is named for the founder of Stoicism, a central tenet of which is that we should live in accord with nature and that we should promote moral pr…
New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 2016. 177 pages. On March 30, 1924, on what was known in England as Mothering Sunday—the day servants were given off to visit their mothers—Jane Fairchild, an orphan and hou…
Dingwall, UK. Sandstone Press. 2016. 307 pages. In 1947 India and Pakistan gained their independence from England and from each other. Millions fled from one side to the other to escape the violence;…
Minneapolis, Minnesota. Uncivilized Books. 2016. 186 pages. Through a series of vignettes depicting the personal life and sexual escapades of Julius Mordecai Pincas (Pascin), French cartoonist Joann S…
London. Istros Books. 2016. 193 pages. When a trauma as perverse, crushing, and searing as the extended, violent breakup of one’s nation occurs, it can take the most sensitive of souls a generation or…
Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2015. 493 pages. When news stories of low wages and mounting student debt are reported side-by-side with reality TV stars and wealthy elites, it almost seems that we are i…
New York. Bellevue Literary Press. 2016. 224 pages. Anarchy has not quite yet faded into the history books. This politico-philosophical movement, which espouses self-governing societies and opposes co…
Dallas, Texas. Deep Vellum. 2016. 400 pages. Anti-Europeans will see this extraordinary book as a knowing critique of a spoiled, corrupt, and quarrelsome lot of countries; pro-Europeans will admire it…
Boston. Little, Brown. 2016. 320 pages. What if? What if Radovan Karadžić—the mastermind of the infamous forty-four-month Siege of Sarajevo in which 11,541 Sarajevans perished—what if Karadžić did…
New York. Minotaur Books. 2016. 406 pages. Nele Neuhaus is a best-seller in Germany and proposes to be one here. She may well succeed. It is easy to see why this is so when reading her latest book. T…
New York. The Mantle. 2016. 110 pages. Despite the significant growth of publication of African drama in the West, Botswana remains underrepresented to a large degree, perhaps even unrepresented until…
New York. New Directions. 2016. 120 pages. Several artists stand out among the many voices that a new wave of translation has made available to anglophone readers; one of these is the Lebanese writer…
New York. Tim Duggan Books. 2016. 246 pages. After seventeen-year-old Paul Utu tells his younger brother, Ajie, of his plan to visit a friend, he vanishes one afternoon in 1995. That event and its cos…
Madrid. Hispabooks. 2016. 289 pages. I remember being disconcerted and dismayed when I came across a posting on the Internet publicizing an exhibit in a museum where a stray dog had been tied up in a…
México City. Planeta. 2015. 255 pages. On November 16, 1989, the US-trained Atlacatl battalion of the Salvadoran army broke into the Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas” (uca) and murdered…
New York. Columbia University Press. 2016. 147 pages. Although the cataclysmic destruction visited upon Japan on March 11, 2011, by an earthquake of unprecedented magnitude and its attendant tsunami…
Le Bouscat, France. Finitude. 2016. 158 pages. In this short novel, an unconventional and, apparently, blissfully happy couple, as seen through the eyes of their son, dance their way through life, mos…
Brooklyn. Melville House. 2016. 217 pages. Building on an Egyptian literary dystopic tradition, Basma Abdel Aziz transforms queuing into a metaphor for the pervasive institutional and moral c…
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London. Portobello Books. 2016. 224 pages. Human Acts is a very different novel from The Vegetarian, Han Kang’s first novel recently published in English to numerous accolades, inclu…