Bloomington, Indiana. Slavica. 2024. 71 pages.
From the late nineteenth century onward, cotton became Central Asia’s predominant cash crop. To sustain the fields and fields of this “w…
FICTION
London. Tilted Axis Press. 2024. 107 pages. To Hell with Poets fits squarely within Kazakhstan’s rural narratology. And like other countries with a strong pastoral background (or, in…
San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2024. 120 pages. A leaf’s rustling. Branches mingling. In the distance, lightning strikes. Whispers. A felled log. A milkless breast. Dogs. Generations…
New York. Random House. 2024. 286 pages. Téa Obreht’s great new novel is, in fact, a book about war refugees. However, told in first person and set up in the near future in a city tha…
Halifax. Nimbus. 2024. 272 pages. You could read her memoir for the fifty-pounds-of-carrots story—the bag Lorri Neilsen Glenn bought, in an empty lot near the highway, for six dollar…
London. Dar Arab. 2024. 484 pages. “Mecca. The Sacred Mosque . . . Before that moment, everything had been fine.” Thus opens the novel Lost in Mecca, a title paradoxical in its very…
New York. HarperCollins. 2024. 176 pages. This slim and slow novel is the sequel to Japanese writer Satoshi Yagisawa’s award-winning debut, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. In Yagisawa…
New York. W. W. Norton. 2024. 176 pages. Liminality is a term used in anthropology to describe the quandary mode being experienced by humans during the middle stage of a rite of passa…
Fort Smith, Arkansas. Belle Point Press. 2024. 160 pages. It’s been thirty-two years, five novels, and an essay collection since Rilla Askew published Strange Business, her debut shor…
Belgrade. LOM. 2023. 159 pages. Brutal, ruthless, cruel—this is life in the Belgrade neighborhood of Dorćol that Serbian writer Maja Iskra recounts in Aperkat (Uppercut), her critical…
New York. Scribner. 2024. 304 pages. Colm Tóibín—twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, winner of the International Dublin Literary Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and the Folio Prize—…
New York. Ballantine. 2023. 352 pages. Born at dawn in a nondescript Portland hospital, Elspeth Noura “Betty” Rummani, the protagonist in Sarah Cypher’s debut novel, The Skin and Its…
New York. Europa Editions. 2024. 391 pages. The demographic landscape of Europe is changing. With an increasing migrant population, what constitutes a “national” body is also changing…
New York. Liveright. 2024. 272 pages. This novel-memoir traces the rise of Ukrainian nationalism through the lens of one of its most fervent supporters, Viacheslav Lypynskyi (1882–193…
New York. Scribe. 2024. 279 pages. In Juja, one thread holds together many women’s stories: a short book written in 1953, Ice Age, by a mysterious author in Paris, Saré, that seems to…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2024. 198 pages. How to write a novel about art? If anything, the novel risks reducing art to the experience of the protagonist, the artist. While…
New York. Knopf. 2024. 496 pages. From first page to last, this novel is colored by the water sign. It begins with a raindrop and ends with a flood. Any drop of water at all holds the…
New York. Pantheon Books. 2024. 308 pages. Iranian American authors are often called upon to represent their culture and people against a steady stream of unpleasant news headlines ab…
Trans. Oonagh Stransky. New York. Europa. 2024. 144 pages. Lifelong repercussions of an obsessive, unrequited love mingle with lyrical ruminations on death, language, and literature i…
London. Bloomsbury. 2023. 288 pages. Indian novelist Anjum Hasan dexterously weaves together the history of communal fault lines in History’s Angel, her evocative new novel. The title…
London. Pushkin Press. 2024. 272 pages. So many writers have presented Red Riding Hood’s journey through the woods as an analogy for female adolescence that the forest has become an e…
Shanghai. Shanghai Sanlian Culture Publishing House. 2024. 308 pages. Shuang Xuetao, who was born in 1983 and raised in northern China, began his writing career in his late twenties.…
Seattle. Cune Press. 2024. 198 pages. With a sharp eye for detail, Gretchen McCullough’s Shahrazad’s Gift is a short-story collection that delves into Cairo’s lively, chaotic daily in…
St. Paul, Minnesota. River Boat Books. 2023. 409 pages. There has been an astonishing resurgence of Nazis in recent years, in the books we read, in the films we watch, even in our pol…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2024. 213 pages. Vienna is at the intersection of at least two important, but also rather niche, cultural regions: the onetime administrative cent…