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…
FICTION
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…
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…
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…