New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 256 pages.
This new collection of short stories by Yiyun Li will only enhance her reputation as one of the foremost fiction writers in Amer…
FICTION
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 256 pages. Regret is a force that changes us. It immerses us in melancholy and begs questions, without answers, about what could’ve been. T…
New York. New Directions. 2023. 293 pages. Is the bond between a government and its citizens comparable to the relationship between lovers? I couldn’t help but ask myself this questi…
New York. Soho Press. 2023. 458 pages. In one of my favorite moments in Siddhartha Deb’s ambitious, multiple-strand, cross-genre epic The Light at the End of the World, a man stands before an oracular…
Beijing. Beijing United. 2023. 320 pages. Liang Xiaosheng (b. 1949) always called himself a recorder of the era. He is good at realistic writing. Unlike those who depict and reflect r…
Stockholm. Artisticum. 2022. 133 pages. It takes ingenuity to write a novel combining a reckoning with the place of one’s birth and an homage to a great architect who was never there.…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 410 pages. Dramatic irony is one of the basic theatrical devices. It works by withholding certain knowledge from a character, while sharing…
New York. Europa Editions. 2023. 512 pages. One would need forever to plunge into the upheavals that have shaken Russia over the past century. Forty-six-year-old Guzel Yakhina underst…
Paris. Spinelle. 2023. 146 pages. With his unique style, imbued with seriousness and humor, the French-Swedish writer Claude Kayat’s most recent novel, La voix du terroriste, deals wi…
New York. New York Review Books. 2023. 254 pages. W the Whore consists of three graphic novels originally published in Germany in 2001, 2003, and 2007 and now considered a classic in…
New York. Archipelago. 2023. 102 pages. Since the mid-1990s, renowned Peruvian writer Augusto Higa Oshiro (b. 1946) has interrogated through his literature what it means to be a nisei…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 331 pages. Aleksandar Hemon’s brilliant new novel tells the harrowing tale of its Sarajevan protagonist, Rafael (Rafe) Pinto. A homosexual,…
Berkeley. Counterpoint. 2023. 208 pages. Maru Ayase (b. 1986) is a well-established author with numerous novels under her belt, but the work under review is her first to be translated…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2023. 368 pages. The information revolution brings a new round of human alienation, and the existential crisis becomes more apparent. In her timely novel Girlf…
New York. Doubleday. 2023. 240 pages. Julie Schumacher first introduced us to Jason Fitger, the middle-aged, disgruntled creative writing professor at Payne University, and writer of…
London. Seagull Books. 2022. 388 pages. Gábor Vida is a Transylvanian Hungarian writer of distinction. His novel Egy dadogás története was first published in 2017 and received rave re…
Leeds, UK. Peepal Tree Press. 2023. 196 pages. Longing doesn’t just make the heart grow fonder. Desire makes it grow in every direction and back again. We look beneath rocks, pursue c…
New York. Europa. 2023. 336 pages. Catherine Chidgey’s Pet is a powerful novel about eroding innocence, contagious intolerance, and duplicitous authority figures. The story, set in 19…
New York. Knopf. 2023. 352 pages. The phrase “that’s just what you do,” spoken by the protagonist’s mother in part 1 of Ayobami Adebayo’s A Spell of Good Things, takes on layers of me…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 256 pages. Mozambican writer Mia Couto concludes his Sands of the Emperor trilogy with The Drinker of Horizons, again translated from Portug…
New York. Liveright. 2023. 166 pages. In music, when one wants to sound impressive, it’s best to play something fast; prestissimo gets the audience’s pulse up. If what is desired, how…
Prague. Karolinum Press. 2022. 110 pages. Much has been written on the horrifying abuses of justice in the former Soviet Union and in most countries of the Communist bloc, but relatively little specif…
New York. Other Press. 2022. 419 pages. Anyone who’s been to a large family gathering has heard memories turned into stories, stories in which the teller has enlarged on the known facts. We appreciate…
Frankfurt am Main. CEEOLPress. 2022. 400 pages. This novel is terrifying. Hungarian writer Gábor Zoltán, after a great deal of archival research, has created a nightmarish recounting of events from th…
Syracuse, New York. Syracuse University Press. 2022. 623 pages. Alexandrian-born novelist Reem Bassiouney has steadily been establishing herself as one of the freshest voices in Arabic literature with…