FICTION
-
Tallahassee, Florida. Cheeky Frawg. 2012. ISBN 9780985790400 After reading the singular stories in Swedish author Karin Tidbeck’s first collection, what lingers in the mind is their deadpan strangenes... -
Paris. Gallimard. 2013. ISBN 9782070126699 Marie NDiaye’s new novel, with perhaps the most complex plot of any of her works, tells a story of four generations, taking place over more than fifty years....
-
Paris. P.O.L. 2013. ISBN 9782818017852 The narrator of Christine Montalbetti’s latest novel is a French writer who has decided to spend a few months in Kyoto in order to work on a book, an “uncertain...
-
New York. Knopf. 2013. ISBN 9780307962577 Set against Charles Taylor’s rule of Liberia, Alexander Maksik’s novel transmutes the bloody madness of civil war into the advancing disorientation of Jacquel...
-
Victoria Cribb, tr. New York. Seven Stories. 2012. ISBN 978-1609804268 Ovar LoveStar is the seventy-one-year-old chairman of a vast corporate entity whose tendrils infiltrate every aspect of life. In...
-
Helen Constantine, ed. Margaret Jull Costa, tr. New York. Oxford University Press. 2012. ISBN 9780199583270 Madrid Tales is a wonderful collection of short stories written by a diverse cadre...
-
Pasadena, California. Red Hen Press. 2013. ISBN 9781597092685 Andrew Lam, author of the essay collections Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora and East Eats West: Writin...
-
New York. Riverhead. 2013. ISBN 9781594487293 When we meet the protagonist of Mohsin Hamid’s novel, he is “huddled on the packed earth” under his mother’s cot, feverish and suffering from hepatitis E....
-
Douglas Brinkley, ed. Johnny Depp, intro. New York. Infinitum Nihil / Harper. 2013. ISBN 9780062248398 It is customary when a reviewer has personal or business relationships with the author of a book...
-
Antony Shugaar, tr. New York. Europa. 2012. ISBN 9781609450656 I Hadn’t Understood follows a lawyer named Vincenzo Malinconico who lives in Naples and has an ex-wife, two children, and a clie...
-
Madrid. Editorial Funambulista. 2012. ISBN 9788494029325 What is most striking about Diego Cornejo Menacho’s third novel is how his proliferating imagination frees just about every known narrative com...
-
Clifford Endres & Selhan Endres, tr. London. Telegram. 2012. ISBN 978-1846591488 Selçuk Altun’s sixth novel, The Sultan of Byzantium, positions itself as a skillfully constructed tribute...
-
Michael Hofmann, tr. New York. Other Press. 2012. ISBN 9781590513248 Critically acclaimed throughout European literary circles, Swiss author Peter Stamm achieved his breakthrough in the United States...
-
Adriana Hunter, tr. London. Atlantic. 2012. ISBN 9781848874183 Set in World War II, during the Nazi occupation of Belgium, Noah’s Child recounts the story of Joseph, a ten-year-old child whos...
-
Paris. Seuil. 2013. ISBN 9782021003949 Alain Mabanckou is one of the most widely read and discussed African writers today. After publishing a number of well-received novels and winning several prizes,...
-
New York. W.W. Norton. 2012. ISBN 9780393083217 Sylvia Plath did it with the oven door ajar. John Kennedy Toole did it with a garden hose. Hart Crane did it with the famous farewell, “Goodbye, everybo...
-
David Williams, tr. Brooklyn, New York. Archipelago. 2012. ISBN 9781935744320 Mama Leone, by Miljenko Jergović (b. 1966), has an interesting structure: the first part of the book, “When I Was...
-
Brian Bergstrom & Lucy Fraser, tr. Oakland, California. PM Press (IPG, distr.). 2012. ISBN 9781604865912 “My wish is for the words in these stories to . . . lodge themselves within the bodies of...
-
Bristol. Tangent. 2012. ISBN 9781906477608 My Mother Was an Upright Piano is Tania Hershman’s second collection of very short stories—her first, The White Road and Other Stories, was...
-
Liesl Schillinger, tr. New York / London. Viking / Chatto & Windus. 2012. ISBN 9780670023509 / 0701186944 Readers and foreign presses have embraced Every Day, Every Hour as an enchanting...
-
Minneapolis, Minn. Milkweed. 2013. ISBN 9781571310972 In Tamas Dobozy’s previous book, Last Notes and Other Stories (see WLT Nov. 2006, 55), Hungarian survivors of World War II are j...
-
Ljouwert, Netherlands. Friese Pers. 2012. ISBN 9789033002625 In this slim novel, Sietse de Vries continues to play with variations on the crime-novel formula. In Kugels foar Kant (see WLT...
-
New York. Harper. 2012. ISBN 9780061493348 Michael Chabon’s novel Telegraph Avenue, on a basic level, is about work life and home life in Oakland, California. Longtime friends Archy and Nat o...
-
Mexico City. Alfaguara. 2013. ISBN 9786071123688 Through the intricate plot and multitude of characters, both principal and peripheral, Carmen Boullosa’s novel Texas seems to score a direct h...
-
New York. Simon & Schuster. 2012. ISBN 9781451633924 A June 2012 Indie Next pick, this first novel follows six years in the life of an educated middle-class Athenian family, its father long dead,...
