Michael F. Moore, tr. New York. New York Review Books. 2014. ISBN 9781590177235
Alberto Moravia (1907–1990) is a writer who deserves to be more widely read than he is these days. The author of countl…
FICTION
New York. Knopf. 2014. ISBN 9780307266385 The temptation to use the term “ripped from the headlines” is strong, but this remarkably moving novel about the kidnapping of thirty African girls predates r…
Sue Branford, tr. London. Latin American Bureau. 2013. ISBN 9781899365777 In Bernardo Kucinski’s novel K, an elderly man searches for his adult daughter, a political militant who vanishes at…
Michael M. Naydan, ed. London. Glagoslav. 2014. ISBN 9781909156012 The common thread that unites the diverse works of fiction presented in Herstories is that they were all written by Ukrainia…
Clarissa Botsford, tr. London / New York. And Other Stories. 2014. ISBN 9781908276346 Sworn Virgin, winner of the English PEN Award, highlights the consequences of a little-known cultural pr…
Paris. Gallimard. 2014. ISBN 9782070146284 In his third novel, Ousmane Diarra (who works as a librarian in Bamako) describes the disasters caused by the Islamic fundamentalists who have attempted to…
Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France. Cheyne. 2014. ISBN 9782841161973 Marie Cosnay’s latest novel, like many of her other books, involves a quest for origins, as a young woman named Helen searches for her…
Iowa City. Rescue Press (SPD, distr.). 2013. ISBN 9780988587335 One aspiration of many writers is to maintain a comical thread throughout a serious work. Jonathan Blum is just such a writer. In his de…
Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Algonquin. 2014. ISBN 9781616203214 Recently widowed A. J. Fikry seems the last person on Alice Island to whom one would entrust a toddler named Maya. But he owns a bookst…
New York. The New Press. 2014. ISBN 9781595589620 Mercia Murray has been abandoned. Disposed of and dumped by her lover of twenty-four years. She attempts to make sense of a senseless act. After almo…
Maureen Freely & Alexander Dawe, tr. New York. Penguin. 2013. ISBN 9780143106739 “The privilege I most treasured as a child was that of freedom,” says Hayri İrdal in The Time Regulation Insti…
Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky. Hard to Be a God. Olena Bormashenko, tr. Hari Kunzru, intro. Chicago. Chicago Review Press. 2014. ISBN 9781613748282 ———. Definitely Maybe: A Man…
Anastasia Maximova & Peter Bush, tr. London. MacLehose. 2013. ISBN 9780857051585 Russian Stories is a collection of twenty-one short stories supposedly written by authors who, according t…
Shaun Whiteside, tr. New York. Bloomsbury. 2014. ISBN 9781620403389 Inge Lohmark teaches biology at a “gymnasium” in a backwater town in the remotest former East Germany, which, even more than most of…
Edward Gauvin, tr. Christophe Blain, ill. London / New York. SelfMadeHero / Abrams. 2014. ISBN 9781906838782 Weapons of Mass Diplomacy demonstrates indisputably that a graphic novel can provi…
New York. Dr. Cicero Books. 2014. ISBN 9780615917061 John M. Keller’s The Box and the Briefcase, the Moleque and the Old Man and the First Coming of the Second Son of God is the latest in a l…
Michelle Hartman, tr. Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink. 2014. ISBN 9781566569620 Iman Humaydan is a Lebanese writer with two acclaimed novels to her credit, B as in Beirut and Wild…
Dhaka, Bangladesh. Daily Star Books. 2013. ISBN 9789849027195 Explicitly aware of Farah Ghuznavi’s famed pedigree and background as a development consultant for over two decades with the nongovernmen…
Lanham, Maryland. Hamilton Books / Rowman & Littlefield. 2013. ISBN 9780761861744 The secret of Rose-Anne Riley was that she had been raped in her youth by Philip Arlington, the brash only son of…
New York. Hogarth. 2014. ISBN 9780804139090 Ruby is a cluster of arresting stories and savory exchanges among the black inhabitants of a town named Liberty in East Texas. The stories create a…
Ann Goldstein, tr. San Francisco. McSweeney’s Books. 2014. ISBN 9781938073960 There are two novellas in this volume, either of which might easily stand on its own. Yet they complement each other in c…
New York. Riverhead. 2013. ISBN 9781594631719 In 2008 the New Yorker published “The Idiot President,” a story unpublished in English that, according to Daniel Alarcón, had as a source the the…
Barcelona. Anagrama. 2014. ISBN 9788433997715 If “publish or perish” is an academic creed, Alejandro Zambra abides by “polish or perish.” The eleven narratives included under an ingenious title, which…
Brussels. Éditions M.E.O. 2014. ISBN 9782930702773 Twenty years ago, church historian Martin Marty and his accomplice Jerald C. Brauer, the late dean of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, w…
New York. Bloomsbury. 2013. ISBN 9781608199563 “In the land where Orwell was born, 1984 was never imaginary. In India it was real.” That year, Indira Gandhi was assassinated and anti-Sikh riots escal…