London. Faber & Faber. 2023. 304 pages.
In her first collection of short stories written in English, Yan Ge presents tales that mesmerize and unsettle. Much like her Strange Beast…
FICTION
Padstow, UK. 3Times Rebel. 2023 (©2022). 226 pages. Sexual stories are difficult to tell well. Writers get bogged down in the complexities of the emotional gymnastics of sex, to say n…
Los Angeles. And Other Stories. 2024. 240 pages. Michelino has grown up spending summers at his grandfather’s estate near Lake Maggiore in northern Italy, immersed in the stories of h…
Montréal. Mémoire d’encrier. 2023. 192 pages. Adrien Chanson will stop at nothing to obtain a violin, the instrument that has enchanted him since the moment he saw Monsieur Benjamin,…
Richmond, Virginia. Honford Star. 2023. 128 pages. That the Second World War—not just the atomic bombs, as kaiju movies emphasize, but the whole imperial enterprise Japan undertook in…
Rochester. Open Letter Books. 2023. 303 pages. Katie Whittemore’s translation of Juan Gómez Bárcena’s Not Even the Dead is a master class in the art of translation. Originally publish…
New Haven. Yale University Press. 2023. 168 pages. Ludmila Ulitskaya’s magnificent new collection, The Body of the Soul, enhances her reputation as one of the most important Russian w…
New York. Knopf. 2023. 224 pages. Jhumpa Lahiri began her career as a creative writer with the publication of her first collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies (1999)…
Berkeley, California. Counterpoint Press. 2023. 217 pages. A Dictator Calls melds history, fiction, memoir, and myth to explore the pernicious link between art and autocracy. Focused…
New York. Grove Press. 2023. 47 pages. The Irish writer Claire Keegan is one of the most significant story writers in the English language. In her native country, she is considered a…
Oakland, California. Transit Books. 2023. 112 pages. If you are looking for a manageable first exposure to the work of 2023’s Nobel Prize winner, Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, you might…
New York. Harper. 2023. 299 pages. My main defense for reading so much mystery and crime fiction is that such books help sustain classic realism. Characters are set in an environment…
Lima. Alfaguara. 2023. 258 pages. In early 2023 Gustavo Rodríguez’s latest novel, Cien cuyes, was awarded Spain’s coveted Premio Alfaguara de Novela. Cien cuyes tells the story of Eu…
Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2023. 224 pages. Black Foam, longlisted for the 2019 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, is a painful cry for survival in a world where truth can be a de…
New York. Riverhead Books. 2023. 436 pages. Anne McLean’s English translation of Retrospective, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, is a masterpiece in literary translation. Not only should we b…
Dallas. Deep Vellum. 2023. 200 pages. In Recital of the Dark Verses, Mexican poet and critic Luis Felipe Fabre takes the famous sixteenth-century verse of Carmelite…
London. Verso. 2023. 276 pages. The award-winning Crooked Plow is a family saga set in the sertão, or backlands, of Brazil’s State of Bahia, an area that since colonial times has been…
Cairo. Hoopoe. 2023. 443 pages. A Stranger in Baghdad is the literary debut of author Elizabeth Loudon, who lived in Iraq during the 1970s. It is a stirring novel about a family—and t…
New York. Ballantine Books. 2023. 352 pages. Parini Shroff’s debut novel, The Bandit Queens, uses the story of Phoolan Devi (the “Bandit Queen”) as a vehicle to consider the violence…
Minneapolis. Graywolf. 2023. 136 pages. Max Porter burst on the literary scene in 2015 with his debut novel, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, which went on to win the Dylan Thomas Pr…
Edinburgh. Charco Press. 2023. 104 pages. Of Cattle and Men is an excellent book of many dark, quiet questions. What does death mean to men who work in a slaughterhouse, who manually…
New York. Archipelago Books. 2023. 340 pages. Tali Girls, Afghan author Siamak Herawi’s first novel to be translated into English (melodically, by Sara Khalili), is a propulsive and…
New York. One World. 2023. 304 pages. Both the epigraph to Victor LaValle’s new novel (taken from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon) and the opening paragraph conspire to capture the re…
Middletown, Connecticut. Wesleyan University Press. 2023. 109 pages. The prolific author of more than forty works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry since 1961, recipient of the 2022…
Hangzhou. Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House. 2023. 197 pages. Nobel laureate Mo Yan once swore in front of the Shakespeare statue in Stratford upon Avon to take advantage…