Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2019. 160 pages.
Jakarta (Yakarta in the original Spanish) is a taut novel set in an unnamed city beset by plague and social unrest, where Mes…
FICTION
Atlanta. Meerkat Press. 2019. 100 pages. Kaaron Warren relives her fascination with ghosts and, like every great writer, steals her stories from the everyday. But nothing is everyday in where s…
New York. Catapult. 2019. 257 pages. Humiliation, Paulina Flores’s debut collection of short stories, beautifully translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, is a timely work that p…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2019. 278 pages. Johannes Anyuru turns sturm und drang into elegant speculative fiction in his novel They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears.…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2019. 545 pages. In Rodrigo Fresán’s The Dreamed Part, one of his book-besotted characters spends many hours rereading a single story, a “mad an…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 288 pages. Literary criticism nowadays tends to walk the line between aesthetic and political judgment, but when it comes to the novels of Michel Houe…
Paris. Gallimard. 2019. 144 pages. This short novel from the 2014 Nobel Prize laureate covers familiar themes of evanescent recollection and impossible forgetting. Encre sympathique, or invi…
New York. Bloomsbury. 2019. 320 pages. The tale of Tequila Leila begins with an end. The first page of Elif Shafak’s new novel, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, finds…
New York. Penguin Random House. 2019. 416 pages. Salman Rushdie, the much-celebrated as well as vilified Indian-born British author of the novels Midnight’s Children and The…
London. Saqi Books. 2019. 87 pages. When Egyptian critic and noted journalist Mohamed Shoair uncovered a collection of never-before-seen stories by Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, he labeled the disco…
London. Fitzcarraldo Editions. 2019. 131 pages. In January of this year, I had the pleasure of meeting Carlos Manuel Álvarez in Havana. We met at Café Fortuna Joe, a hipstery coffee house in Pl…
London. Oneworld. 2019. 197 pages. Thanks to Oneworld, readers of English now have the opportunity to experience the widely successful first novel of the Lithuanian actor, director, and poet Al…
New York. Dottir Press. 2019. 271 pages. Please Read This Leaflet Carefully is the interior monologue of Laura Fjellstad, a young woman made old by decades of chronic pain. Told in reverse c…
Hamburg. Edition Nautilus. 2018. 256 pages. Die Tankstelle von Courcelles (The petrol station of courcelles) is the latest offering from German novelist Matthias Wittekindt. As a prequel to…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2019. 240 pages. Hungarian author Zsófia Bán (b. 1957, Rio de Janeiro) fashioned the curious frame of a “night school” to instruct her readers on a long…
New York. Viking. 2019. 304 pages. Monique Truong chose “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” a line from Emily Dickinson, as the epigraph for her provocative third novel, The…
Brighton, Massachusetts. Academic Studies Press. 2018. 316 pages. Farewell, Aylis incorporates three novellas from Azerbaijani author Akram Aylisli, namely Yemen, Stone Dreams…
Mexico City. Planeta. 2019. 248 pages. In 2015 the Independent reported that the United States Treasury Department had sanctioned more businesses for money laundering in Guadalajara—our south…
Montreal. QC Fiction. 2019. 400 pages. In this dark coming-of-age novel, the odds are stacked against the protagonist, Émile Claudel, who gives us the story of his life from birth to age eighte…
Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2019. 212 pages. Flowers of Mold, Mouthful of Birds, Apple and Knife, The Night Circus, Alphaland, Mars—these are…
Cairo. Hoopoe Press. 2019. 269 pages. It is easy to fall in love with Beirut—the blue Mediterranean shimmers in the evening and the joie de vivre of the Lebanese charms visitors. But, as one of…
New York. New Directions. 2019. 576 pages. It is revealing to consider why this book fails so spectacularly—especially given the sustained astonishment László Krasznahorkai’s previo…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 336 pages. The narrator of Tash Aw’s latest novel, We, the Survivors, is an ethnically Hokkien Chinese Malaysian man called Lee Hock Ly…
Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2019. 428 pages. Adam Dannoun, a melancholic Palestinian self-exiled in New York and the protagonist-narrator of Children of the Ghetto, suffers f…
Pasadena, California. Red Hen Press. 2019. 272 pages. The island, from a distance, looks like almost anything other than what it actually is: a place where the world’s detritus washes up, a pla…