Oakland, California. Transit Books. 2020. 340 pages.
JON FOSSE is a well-known and revered multiple award-winning writer in his native Norway. He has published for more than twenty y…
MISCELLANEOUS
New York. New Directions. 2020. 212 pages. JENNY ERPENBECK’S fictional worlds offer us glimpses of what exists below the surface—of land, of water, of consciousness. In her nove…
New York. Columbia University Press. 2020. 277 pages. HOW APPROPRIATE THAT ONE of the most incisive studies of Elena Ferrante to date has been the outcome of an experiment in cr…
Eugene, Oregon. Resource Publications. 2020. 270 pages. GLANCING AT ITS TABLE of contents and finding subjects ranging from C. S. Lewis to Morrissey to the Arab Spring, it might…
New York. And Other Stories. 2020. 120 pages. I’D READ TWO NOVELS written by Yuri Herrera before A Silent Fury. They were both masterpieces of brevity. The restraint an…
Minneapolis, Minnesota. Milkweeed Editions. 2020. 205 pages. FIRST PUBLISHED BY Doubleday Canada in 2002, For Joshua’s posthumous release as the first US edition of the…
Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf Press. 2020. 416 pages. EURASIA'S MOST TUMULTUOUS chapters are preserved in the waters of two prehistoric lakes. In 2017 Kapka Kassabova’s Border…
New York. HarperCollins. 2020. 328 pages. “IMAGINE THIS: the author Fang Fang did not exist in today’s Wuhan. . . . What would we have heard? What would we have seen?” asked wri…
Abingdon, UK. Routledge. 2019. 293 pages. BEYOND EAST AND WEST: A Story of Civilization through the Great Epics, by Suchethana Swaroop, is an attempt to shed light…
London. Faber & Faber. 2019. 239 pages. “WHAT IS NORMAL tea?” Henrietta Lovell, the founder of the Rare Tea Company, wants you to reflect on this question. Hers is a white s…
New York. Spuyten Duyvil. 2020. 222 pages. SMART, BITING, VIOLENT, and often perplexing, this memoir is reminiscent of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. Beyond the authors ha…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2020. 304 pages. LÁSZLO F. FÖLDÉNYI is a widely lauded Hungarian essayist, cultural critic, and professor at the University of The…
New York. Other Press. 2020. 275 pages. DRESSED FOR A DANCE IN THE SNOW represents a work of oral history based on interviews the author conducted with nine female surv…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2020. 368 pages. THIS GRAPHIC NARRATIVE begins in the uncertain days after the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Author and artist Tian V…
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson
New York. Crown. 2020. 585 pages. AFTER READING this study and skimming the end sections, I stand in awe: what one man can research, consolidate, and narrate in prose that reads…
New York. Grove Press. 2020. 209 pages. YAN LIANKE'S Three Brothers: Memories of My Family is a powerful portrait of the trials of daily life in Song County, Henan Prov…
London. Honford Star. 2020. 182 pages. WHAT IS LOCAL IDENTITY? What have we lost in the name of development? How do we best pass on traditional culture to…
London. Flipped Eye. 2019. 188 pages. THE IDIOSYNCRASY OF my own origin story made me particularly fascinated by Un Nuevo Sol, a collection of works by British Latinx w…
New York. Doubleday. 2019. 431 pages. Gods of the Upper Air tells the story of Franz Boas, an outspoken critic of white supremacists, and his profound influence on three students—Marga…
London. Verso. 2019. 330 pages. Add Vigdis Hjorth to the growing list of writers of significant autofiction, reality literature whose characters depend on recognizable people and actual situati…
Portland. Tin House Books. 2020. 203 pages. “Dear Eun Ji. Hello, hello, hello, my Eun Ji.” E. J. Koh’s memoir begins with a letter from her mother, its diction informal and lighthearted, its de…
New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 2020. 269 pages. Considered one of Spain’s most acclaimed novelists, Javier Cercas knows how easily men lie to themselves in order to give themselves sufficient leeway to d…
New York. New Directions. 2020. 80 pages. It is no coincidence that this narrative exercise is published after César Aira’s participation at MoMA’s 2017 editorial project The Valise, a colle…
New York. Graywolf Press. 2019. 247 pages. “Writing is a way to get rid of shame,” says Karl Ove Knausgaard, reflecting on why he wrote his celebrated 3,600-plus-page-long multivolume memoir, My…
New York. Other Press. 2020. 421 pages. A lifetime—seventy-five years—has passed since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, and other hellholes emblematic of the European exterminatio…