May 2022
María Gainza’s “Portrait of an Unknown Lady”: Operation Three Women
Reviewed by Alex Gilvarry
María Gainza's latest novel follows the trail of an enigmatic, brilliant forger with intriguing results.
April 2022
Elena Ferrante’s “In the Margins”: Crafted Layers of Truth
Reviewed by Maris Kreizman
Elena Ferrante's essay collection examines the pleasures of reading and writing with the author's characteristic flair for violent honesty.
Halldór Laxness’s “Salka Valka”: Claustrophobia amid the Vastness
Reviewed by Hannah Weber
Halldór Laxness's 1931 novel is a sometimes harrowing coming-of-age story of a young woman in a remote Icelandic fishing village.
March 2022
Olga Tokarczuk’s “The Books of Jacob”: Witnesses to the Messiah
Reviewed by Tara Wanda Merrigan
Olga Tokarczuk's long-awaited opus tells the stories of the followers of Jacob Frank, an eighteenth-century messianic figure.
Olga Ravn’s “The Employees”: A Celestial Journey With Earthly Issues
Reviewed by J. Howard Rosier
Olga Ravn's slim, surprising novel compiles corporate witness accounts from a shocking interstellar mission.
February 2022
Nastassja Martin’s “In the Eye of the Wild”: Embodied by the Bear
Reviewed by Laura Marris
Nastassja Martin's poetic memoir dissects an unforgettable, harrowing encounter with an animal.
January 2022
Mahsa Mohebali’s “In Case of Emergency”: A 24-Hour Hero’s Journey
Reviewed by Benjamin Woodard
Mahsa Mohebali's novel is a snappy, inventive picaresque with an unforgettable lead.
December 2021
Shukri Mabkhout’s “The Italian”: Characters Caught in a Sea Change
Reviewed by Elaine Margolin
Shukri Mabkhout's award winning novel shows characters attempting to navigate a society in tumult.
Samar Yazbek’s “Planet of Clay”: The Urgency of Telling
Reviewed by Ben Goldman
Samar Yazbek's novel uses a memorable narrator to explore the indelibility of storytelling.
Antonio Gamoneda’s “Castilian Blues”: Songs No Longer Silenced
Reviewed by Jose-Luis Moctezuma
Antonio Gamoneda's collection of poems interprets the American blues tradition with powerful results.
November 2021
Helene Bukowski’s “Milk Teeth”: A Plausible Post-Apocalypse
Reviewed by Kevin Canfield
Helene Bukowski's harrowing debut novel invites readers to a strange dystopia.
In “I Was a French Muslim,” a Writer Revisits Internal Tensions of Algeria’s Independence Struggle
Reviewed by Jocelyn Frelier
The strength of Mokhtar Mokhtefi's memoir is in the invitation it offers the reader to experience the personal stakes at the center of all collective struggles.
October 2021
Mario Levrero’s “The Luminous Novel”: Writing as a Spiritual Experience
Reviewed by Isaura Contreras
In a work that takes the form of a diary and a novel, Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero contemplates failure and procrastination to ultimately affirm writing as an act of freedom.
September 2021
“Psychedelic,” “Profound,” “a Feminist Classic”: Magda Cârneci’s “FEM” Challenges Definitions
Reviewed by Jozefina Komporaly
Blurring genre boundaries, Cârneci's debut novel brings to life a mesmerizing landscape of female desire and frustration. As the fragmented yet captivating narrative examines the twin subjects of love and loss, readers are confronted with the ultimate feminist agenda of a woman’s right to choose, together with the numerous hurdles and dilemmas associated with it
“Last Summer in the City,” Gianfranco Calligarich’s Ode to a Long-Gone Lifestyle, Hits a False Note
Reviewed by Allison Grimaldi-Donahue
Set in a deserted Rome during a hot and melancholy August, this 1973 novel now touted as a classic rehashes a familiar theme within Italian literature and film: a country and art of malaise. At turns beautiful and frustrating, it ultimately feels like a pastiche of the works it attempts to keep company with.
August 2021
Marina Jarre’s Stunning Memoir, “Distant Fathers,” Maps Its Author’s Peripatetic Search for Herself
Reviewed by Hannah Weber
“I’m Latvian, but I speak German and I don’t understand who Jesus Christ is,” wrote Jarre, who was born in Latvia to an Italian mother and a Latvian Jewish father, was sent as a child to live in a Francophone community in northern Italy, and later settled in Turin. Her memoir is a multilingual interior monologue which feels like the truest representation of memory (a flood of narratives, images, and dreams outside of time) and shows a woman fumbling for her identity while never feeling wholly at home anywhere.
July 2021
Returning Home in Palestine: On Sahar Khalifeh’s “My First and Only Love”
Reviewed by Max Radwin
A new novel by the celebrated Palestinian writer travels back and forth in time, across decades, examining the way family, politics, and friendship in her homeland are shaped by violence and war.
June 2021
A Pioneer of Decolonial Poetry, Jorgenrique Adoum Finally Gets His Book-length (Post)English Debut
Reviewed by Olivia Lott
Linguistic experimentation and political rebellion went hand in hand in the work of the Ecuadorian Adoum, a leading figure of the Latin American neo-avant-garde who wrote his verses in what he called "postspanish."
May 2021
“The Scar We Know” Shows How Lida Yusupova Shaped Russian Feminist Poetry
Reviewed by Josephine von Zitzewitz
With an unflinching gaze at physical and sexual violence, abundant profanity and a disregard for meter and rhyme, the poems in this collection expose the gruesome routine of gender hierarchy in a society that has turned the shoring up of patriarchal structures into government policy.
In the Stories of Kjell Askildsen, Stasis and Revelation Intertwine
Reviewed by Ben Goldman
The narratives of "Everything Like Before," only the second book by the Norwegian writer to be published in the US, bend toward the seemingly mundane, then sting with an act that might (or might not) change everything.