New York. Seagull Books. 2015. 293 pages.Decades after the Battle of Berlin and the fall of Nazi Germany, sociologists and laymen alike still puzzle over one of the most vexing questions to come…
FICTION
Patrick Hemingway, foreword. Seán Hemingway, intro. New York. Scribner. 2015. 281 pages. In this new edition of Green Hills of Africa, the introduction and, by implication, the apparatus…
Bedford, New York. Fig Tree Books. 2015. 389 pages. From the beginning, Jonathan Papernick thrusts the reader into the middle of a very disorganized life. Matthew Stone, suicidal, somewhat depend…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2015. 286 pages.Is there some inherent quality within the Czech lands that favors an inclination toward the absurd in their literature? Fans and adherents of Czech absu…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015. 592 pages.Ludmila Ulitskaya’s new novel offers an almost ethnographic portrait of Russia’s 1960s generation, who came of age during Khrushchev’s Thaw. The…
Ann Vandermeer & Jeff Vandermeer, ed. Oakland, California. PM Press. (IPG, distr.). 2015. 341 pages.This collection brings together stories from the 1970s onward from new and established writers i…
New York. Atavist Books. 2014. 336 pages.To put this book in any specific genre would be an injustice. A God in Every Stone is firstly a historical fiction, outlining lands long forgotten but…
Paris. Gallimard. 2015. 275 pages. Boualem Sansal often writes about the power of religion in north Africa (see WLT, Sept. 2012, 16–19). In 2084, his seventh novel, which won the Gra…
Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf. 2015. 88 pages.One Out of Two, by Daniel Sada, describes the lives of the Gamal twins, Constitución and Gloria. They live together, work together in their se…
New York. Random House. 2015. 210 pages.In his captivating new novel, the title of which adds up to the magical storytelling formula of 1,001 nights, Salman Rushdie tells a story in which jinn and jin…
New York. Seven Stories Press. 2015. 208 pages. "We perpetuate unto the newest generation the neuroses of our forbearers, wounds we keep inflicting on ourselves like a second layer of genetic ins…
New York. Hogarth. 2015. 332 pages.After the signal achievement of Anthony Marra’s first novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013), one returns with pleasure to Chechnya and Russia for…
New York. Dr. Cicero Books (SPD Books, distr.). 2015. 400 pages.Ashley Mayne’s second novel, Tiger, is a wonderfully empathetic look into the hearts and minds of profoundly damaged…
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 i…
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…
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 spec…
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 an…
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. She…
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 ch…
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…
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 employed…
Boris Dralyuk, tr. Los Angeles. Phoneme Media. 2015. ISBN 9781939419286The poetic proclivity of Moldovan-born Oleg Woolf is everywhere present in his Bessarabian Stamps, a prose work written…