New York. Common Era. 2020. 148 pages.
CAN XUE’S Purple Perilla includes three short stories that immerse readers in a world where reality and absurdity collide. In “An Affai…
FICTION
New York. Penguin. 2021. 666 pages. “FIRSTLY THERE WAS no plot, and secondly there was no sequence of events, and no coherence, everything came at you higgledy-piggledy.” So Karl Ove…
Cairo. Hoopoe. 2021. 333 pages. IN HERE IS A BODY, Basma Abdel Aziz’s follow-up to her acclaimed, award-winning novel The Queue (WLT, Sept. 2016, 73), a cou…
New York / London. Riverhead Books / Fitzcarraldo Editions. 2022. 992 pages. THE YEAR IS 1752 (the page, 900-or-so), and a carriage is barreling through misty Podolia, a historic reg…
Sheffield, UK. And Other Stories. 2020. 165 pages. THE NOVEL WRETCHEDNESS begins with a chance encounter between a cellist and a homeless young man in Malmö, Sweden. It could…
Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2020. 291 pages. THE STORY OF A Single Swallow follows the lives of three men, two westerners and one Chinese, who became friends during World War I…
Bloomington, Indiana. Autumn Hill Books. 2020. 113 pages. IT IS COMMON for Latin American writers to be introduced to readers of other languages with a short novel not fully reflectiv…
New York. World Editions. 2021. 288 pages. SUMMER BROTHER, Dutch writer Jaap Robben’s International Booker Prize–longlisted novel, begins with a weighted query put to a shift…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2021. 128 pages. WILD SWANS, the second short-story collection by Danish author Dorthe Nors, makes its US debut with fourteen mini-tales, nine br…
New York. Bloomsbury. 2021. 152 pages. JUST HOW MUCH can change in a day? For Lucas Pereyra, a fortysomething Argentine writer stuck in a rut—in his work, his marriage, his life—the a…
New York. Soft Skull Press. 2020. 288 pages. AOKO MATSUDA’S STORY cycle takes its title from the children’s story Where the Wild Things Are, the replacement of “Things” with…
Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2021. 204 pages. COMMITTED TO KEEPING Tunisian works available in Tunisia, Yamen Manai has hitherto published with Éditions Elyzad. Now, Amazon Crossing and…
New York. Archipelago Books. 2021. 275 pages. “I LIVE IN A basement; a result of having come down in the world, in every sense.” So begins “A Sudden Liberating Thought,” one of thirty…
New York. Seven Stories Press. 2021. 240 pages. IN HER NATIVE Croatia, Ivana Bodrožić is controversial. While internally displaced as a nine-year-old at the beginning of the civil war…
Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2020. 264 pages. WITH EVERY SENTENCE in his new novel, Roy Jacobsen shows how his characters carve their morality out of the dried driftwood found on the…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2021. 376 pages. MANY OF SONALLAH IBRAHIM’S novels explore how former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s version of socialism was “…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2021. 156 pages. FIGHTING A DREADFUL illness, the eponymous narrator of this sobering novel reflects on a life shaped by personal misfortune and broade…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2021. 260 pages. SLIPPING IS THE FOURTH novel by Mohamed Kheir, the prolific Egyptian poet, novelist, and journalist, as well as the…
Dallas. Deep Vellum. 2021. 238 pages. DEFYING DEFINITION AND regaining it only through comparison with formidable authors who take their art seriously, Magda Cârneci’s FEM is…
New York. Penguin Random House. 2021. 208 pages. A DEAD BABY and her haunted great-niece open The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Mariana Enriquez’s collection of disquieting shor…
Bloomington, Indiana. Slavica Publishers. 2020. 265 pages. “PLEASE, YOU CAN’T look at everything through the lens of politics.” Such is the impassioned plea from our…
Cheshire. Honford Star. 2021. 176 pages. THIS PANDEMIC YEAR has felt like a dystopia to many of us—we were told to stay away from family and friends, urged to remain inside our homes,…
New York. Knopf. 2021. 288 pages. DEVOTED READERS OF the wondrously gifted sixty-six-year-old Israeli author David Grossman eventually fall hopelessly in love with him. There is a mag…
Evanston, Illinois. Curbstone Books. 2021. 133 pages. BENEATH ITS BUSTLING marketplace and wondrous architecture, Fez, Morocco, is no less susceptible to hatred. Tahar Ben Jelloun’s g…
Austin. University of Texas Press. 2020. 232 pages. THE WIND TRAVELER is the latest novel to appear in English by Alonso Cueto, an author known for his Redención tri…