Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2015. 195 pages.
The Story of My Teeth is the third book of Mexican-born Valeria Luiselli, who lives in New York City. Except for the last chapter, the story…
FICTION
New York. Liveright (W.W. Norton, distr.). 2015. 562 pages. Kim Leine struck literary gold with his fourth novel, The Prophets of Eternal Fjord. It is a big book and a great one too: disturb…
Williamstown, Massachusetts. New Europe Books. 2015. 480 pages. Menyhért Lakatos is acclaimed as Hungary’s foremost Romani author, and his novel Füstos képek, translated by Ann Major…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2015. 365 pages. The Wake is the story of a man caught in the grips of two forces, historical and psychological. The force of history, the Norman Conquest (1066),…
New York. Vertical. 2015. 240 pages. This first English translation of Tatsuaki Ishiguro’s metafictions comprises four stories about the last specimens of exceedingly rare, geographically isolated spe…
San Francisco. Tachyon. 2015. 240 pages. In this collection of luminous stories, Nalo Hopkinson writes with an observant intensity that makes her quirky, fantastical worlds palpable. A woman watches a…
London / New York. And Other Stories. 2015. 114 pages. Makina is in charge of a small Mexican town’s telephone. A reliable messenger, she knows how to keep a secret and when to keep her mouth shut. Sh…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2015. 283 pages. Georgi Gospodinov is a Bulgarian writer, poet, and playwright. He was born in 1968 in Yambol, in southeastern Bulgaria, and spent most of his childh…
Michelle Hartman, tr. New York. Akashic Books. 2015. 288 pages. In Beirut Noir, Iman Humaydan has selected a beautiful and often heartbreaking jigsaw portrait of its eponymous city. Like many…
Anna Holmwood, tr. London. Oneworld. 2015. 210 pages. Doused in blood and gushing with ethical conundrums, A Yi’s A Perfect Crime is a disconcerting medley of misanthropy, escapism, and media…
Frankfurt. Suhrkamp. 2014. ISBN 9783518424490. Und jetzt du, Orlando! (And now you, Orlando!) is the account of a friendship between the narrator, Oliver, a German accountant employe…
Boris Dralyuk, tr. Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 2015. ISBN 9781939419286 The poetic proclivity of Moldovan-born Oleg Woolf is everywhere present in his Bessarabian Stamps, a prose work written…
Barcelona. Galaxia Gutenberg. 2015. ISBN 9788416252206 París D.F., Roberto Wong’s first novel, won the Premio Dos Passos first novel prize in October 2014. The thirty-two-year-old Mexican-bor…
New York. W.W. Norton. 2015. ISBN 9780393077803. When someone who holds a reputation as a literary writer publishes a crime novel, mystery writers grimace. Too often the novel originated in a misbegot…
Mary Kitroeff, tr. New York. Europa Editions. 2015. ISBN 9781609452452 In her English-language debut, Greek novelist Fotini Tsalikoglou explores the spaces between the past and the future through an i…
Maureen Freely & John Angliss, tr. New York. Bloomsbury. 2015. ISBN 9781632860613 Reckless is the latest novel by the award-winning Turkish writer Hasan Ali Toptas and the first of his bo…
Marian Schwartz, Leo Shtutin, Sylvia Maizell, & Mariya Bashkatova, trs. Dallas. Deep Vellum. 2015. ISBN 9781941920039 Mikhail Shishkin is a major figure in contemporary Russian literature…
Nurhayat Indriyatno Mohamed, tr. San Mateo, California. Dalang. 2014. ISBN 9780983627326. This English translation of popular Indonesian author Ahmad Tohari’s Bekisar Merah (2011) tells the s…
Hanover, New Hampshire. Steerforth Press. 2015. ISBN 9781586422332. Katja Rudolph’s Evergreen Award–nominated first novel follows the Serb-Croat Andric family—journalist father, pianist mother, teenag…
Don Bartlett, tr. Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf Press. 2014. ISBN 9781555976996. I Refuse begins with the chance meeting of former best friends Jim and Tommy after thirty-five years. The n…
New York. Little, Brown. 2015. ISBN 9780316338370 Set amid the political instability of 1990s Nigeria, Chigozie Obioma’s first novel depicts the traumatic events that befall an Igbo family living in t…
Stanford, California. Redwoods Press. 2015. ISBN 9780804793254 Bahiyyih Nakhjavani’s third novel, The Woman Who Read Too Much, retells the life and martyrdom of the nineteenth-century Persian…
Paris. Gallimard. 2015. ISBN 9782070148271. Le Méridional, Henri Lopes’s ninth novel, presents a fine portrayal of the life of an African long residing in France, narrated by a writer whose l…
New York. HarperCollins / Amistad. 2015. ISBN 9780062348135 In his debut novel, God Loves Haiti, Dimitry Elias Léger uses the 2010 earthquake in Haiti as the backdrop for a love triangle. A f…
Daniel Bowles, tr. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015. ISBN 9780374175245 The “imperium” of the title refers, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, to Germany at the “global zenith of [its] influence” ar…