Sally-Ann Spencer, tr. London. Harvill Secker. 2012. ISBN 9781846554278
Sympathy for a terrorist? Rebellion against preventive health-care measures? In Germany, Juli Zeh is a highly visible political…
FICTION
- Barcelona. Anagrama. 2012. ISBN 978-8433972359 It is no accident that Juan Villoro is classified as a postmodern author. We know that, in general, literary criticism resorts to the postmodern label wh…
- Toronto. Doubleday Canada. 2012. ISBN 9780385667142 The Magic of Saida, set in India, East Africa, and Canada, is the latest novel by the prolific African Asian Canadian author M. G. Vassanji…
- Peter Sherwood, tr. London. Stork Press. 2012. ISBN 9780957132665 In the first paragraph of this “were-tale for six actors, five voices, two players,” narrator Jerne Voltampere proffers fair warning:…
- Camellia Nieh & Jonathan Lloyd-Davies, tr. New York. Vertical. 2012. ISBN 9781934287385 In Edge, Koji Suzuki devises an inspired premise and pummels it half to death. Suzuki has been tout…
- Victoria Cribb, tr. London. Telegram. 2012. ISBN 9781846591242 Valdimar Haraldsson, in The Whispering Muse, finds that fish are both sustenance and inspiration. His preoccupation with fish co…
- Marian Schwartz, tr. Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2012. ISBN 9781934824368 Mikhail Shishkin has been publishing in Russia to acclaim and accolades for almost twenty years. His work is allusive,…
- Belgrade. Prosveta. 2012. ISBN 9788607019663 Mitrova Amerika (Mitar’s America) is the Serbian literary contribution to the topic of immigration to the United States. In this intriguing novel,…
- New York. Ecco / HarperCollins. 2012. ISBN 9780062095626 How seemingly easy it is to assess the latest works by authors who write slowly, who—one wants to believe—carefully measure and remeasure their…
- Seuil. Paris. 2012. ISBN 9782020986694 Tierno Monénembo has traveled widely since he left Guinea in 1969 to escape Sékou Touré’s dictatorship. His novels often reflect his own experiences or are based…
- Madeline G. Levine, tr. Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern University Press. 2012. ISBN 9780810127937 After a distinguished career as a ballistics and algorithms patent holder, Wilhelm Dichter started w…
- New York. Riverhead. 2012. ISBN 9781594487361 These days, more and more people in both the United States and Latin America are “downloadeando” music, “parqueando” their cars, and eating “lonche” in th…
- Frank Stock, tr. Los Angeles. Semiotext(e) (MIT Press, distr.). 2012. ISBN 9781584351115 Abdellah Taïa’s Une mélancolie arabe was published in 2008 in Paris, where he now lives. It is in many…
- Munich. Hanser. 2012. ISBN 9783446238657 If you aren’t yet familiar with Botho Strauss, one of Germany’s most critically acclaimed prose writers of the last forty years and arguably its most well-know…
- Andrea G. Labinger, tr. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Latin American Literary Review Press. 2012. ISBN 9781891270505 Friends of Mine contains a series of seemingly unrelated events in the lives o…
- Paris. Albin Michel. 2012. ISBN 9782226242969 Feminist revisionist mythmaking has often seized on the legend of Bluebeard, supposedly inspired by the fifteenth-century Breton serial killer Gilles de R…
- John Fletcher, tr. London. MacLehose Press. 2012. ISBN 9780857050564 With Three Strong Women, Marie NDiaye became the first black woman to win the Prix Goncourt. This intricately st…
- Noha Radwan, tr. Northampton, Massachusetts. Interlink. 2012. ISBN 9781566568821 Shagara, a minor employee in the shipyards of Alexandria and the first-person narrator of The House of Jasmine…
- Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2012. ISBN 9781555976118 Shehan Karunatilaka’s first novel brilliantly exemplifies the best capacity of contemporary literature to make the stuff of local lives absolutely…
- Artarmon, New South Wales / Marietta, Georgia. Giramondo / Top Shelf. 2012. ISBN 9781603091534 The Australian comics scene has historically been a parenthetical description added to anglophone comics…
- Diego Trelles Paz, ed. Janet Hendrickson, tr. Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2012. ISBN 9781934824641 The Future Is Not Ours compiles twenty-three stories from fifteen Latin American coun…
- Hornsea, England. PS Publishing. 2012. ISBN 9781848634541 Synth is a drug, able to induce full sensory hallucinations indistinguishable from reality. But Synth is new, of uncertain provenance, its lon…
- Marina Harss, tr. New York. Other Press. 2012. ISBN 9781590515112 Writer and filmmaker Cristina Comencini’s 2009 novel Quando la notte was a hit in Italy, as was her film based on the book,…
- Paris. Gallimard. 2012. ISBN 9782070136186 Rewritings of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe have been numerous, especially among Caribbean writers. Robinson Crusoe presumably landed on the island of To…
- New York. Ecco / HarperCollins. 2013. ISBN 9780062198792 Rilla Askew’s fourth novel is a brilliant evocation of Heraclitus’s axiom that character is fate—an ironic evocation she both confirms and turn…