Toronto. Coach House Books. 2022. 152 pages.
POISED ON THE “chasm’s edge,” Anne Lardeux’s The Second Substance demands that readers query their environment—its possibilities…
FICTION
- New York. New Directions. 2022. 112 pages. LUCKY BREAKS, by Yevgenia Belorusets, is an experimental approach to the novel that neither follows a traditional story arc nor ad…
- Paris. P.O.L. 2022. 204 pages. READERS FAMILIAR WITH his work know Gérard Gavarry as a master of French prose style as well as a writer who comes to each project with a fresh pe…
- Paris. Gallimard. 2022. 368 pages. THIS NOVEL IS the second part of a trilogy, Le Pays des autres (see WLT, Autumn 2020, 95), partly based on the author’s family hi…
- New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2022. 419 pages. PATRICE NGANANG’S NEWLY translated novel, A Trail of Crab Tracks, follows the relationship between Tanou, a Camero…
- New York. Other Press. 2022. 320 pages. ABOUT A QUARTER of the way through The Last Island, Zülfü Livaneli’s latest novel to be translated into English, a figure known…
- Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2022. 226 pages. WALK ME TO THE CORNER is the tenth comic book by the award-winning Swedish painter, illustrator, and graphic artist An…
- San Francisco. City Lights Books. 2022. 120 pages. THE EIGHT SHORT stories in Family Album live up to the book’s title, their names underscoring the concept: Baptism, Summer…
- New York. Cambria Press. 2021. 248 pages. PUBLISHED SHORTLY AFTER Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage, Queer Taiwanese Literature…
- Trans. Claire Wadie. New York. New Vessel Press. 2022. 187 pages. BORN IN 1980 in Sama de Grado, Asturias, Spain, Manuel Astur is a teacher, poet, fiction writer, essayist, and…
- Norman. University of Oklahoma Press. 2022. 369 pages. IS MARTYRDOM FATED, a choice, both? Thus the parameters of Rilla Askew’s new novel, whose title and prologue leave no doubt of…
- New York. New Directions. 2022. 64 pages. IN “MAJAKOWSKIRING,” the second story in Yoko Tawada’s Three Streets, an unnamed narrator encounters an undead writer. Vladimir May…
- New York. Penguin. 2022. 320 pages. OTTESSA MOSHFEGH’S Lapvona is a study in power. It is an autopsy of the gaping gulf between abundance and misery, orchestrated by Vi…
- New York. HarperVia. 2022. 224 pages. SOME NOVELS SHOUT their politics; others whisper them. Anuradha Roy’s compelling fifth novel, The Earthspinner, belongs t…
- Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2022. 128 pages. EMMELIE PROPHÈTE’S Blue is a study in liminality and alienation. Blue is set in a Miami airport, a liminal space whe…
- San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2022. 168 pages. FOLLOWING PUBLICATION OF Masatsugu Ono’s Echo on the Bay and Lion Cross Point (translated by Angus Turvill; see…
- New York. MCD. 2022. 272 pages. JONATHAN ESCOFFERY, recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize and the ASME Award for Fiction, builds a vibrant family saga from a series of interconne…
- Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2022. 152 pages. SCHOLASTIQUE MUKASONGA’S family was massacred in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Mukasonga was elsewhere and missed the carnage; forcing he…
- New York. Viking. 2022. 288 pages. A DREAM: I am helping a boy fly a kite. We are in Afghanistan, where, it seems, all boys fly kites, especially in spring. Spring:…
- Berkeley. Stone Bridge Press. 2022. 264 pages. EMMITT HAS A PLAN for the next year: move out of his in-laws’ house and into his dream home with his wife, Mirai, quit his unfulfi…
- New York. Other Press. 2022. 160 pages. MIGUEL BONNEFOY FREEFALLS into his strangely alluring new novel, Heritage, which makes a desperate attempt to understand the internal…
- Barcelona. Comba. 2021. 290 pages. CARMEN, a thirty-six-year-old professor, visits her hometown, Tarsis, a mining town in the province of Huelva in southern Spain. The return br…
- Mexico City. Seix Barral. 2021. 394 pages. In Y LÍBRANOS DEL MAL, Santiago Roncagliolo’s latest novel, the Peruvian author and winner of the prestigious Premio…
- Fredericton, New Brunswick. Goose Lane Editions. 2022. 256 pages. THE EPIGRAPH TO Elaine McCluskey’s fourth collection of stories is drawn from her story “Hope”: “Life is just one ex…
- New York. Liveright. 2022. 304 pages. THE PROTAGONIST OF the novel Time Shelter reads a newspaper article describing a geriatrics doctor who “decked out his office in the st…