You don’t need to be a soccer fan to appreciate the game’s intrinsic drama. Nowhere is it more evident than in the penalty kick. At times the whole game can come down to a tense face-off between a kicker and a goalie—never mind how well or poorly both teams have played in the many minutes…

Our editors share a few of the most memorable books of the year Michelle Bailat-Jones, translations editor Translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison, Gerda Blees’ We Are Light (World Editions, 2023) is an innovative and riveting multi-vocal novel following three members of the Sound and Love Commune—who believe they can exist on light and love…

Our editors share their recommendations for books to enjoy over the summer break Lacey Dunham, fiction editor The narrator in Johanne Lykke Holm’s novel Strega (Riverhead, 2022), translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel,  is sent by her parents along with eight other girls to a remote resort hotel in the Italian alps. The girls…

I was in Rome when I first encountered Natalia Ginzburg’s The Road that Goes to the City, in a bookstore on the Campo di Fiori just steps from where, in 1600, the philosopher Giordano Bruno was executed for heresy. A bronze statue of Bruno looms over the square, a reminder of what can happen when…

Allegra Douglass, a professor of philosophy in New York City, is living the dream. Recently been promoted to tenure with a named chair, she has a loving partner, the respect of (most of) her colleagues, talented students, and work she enjoys. She’s also Black, and she’s traveled a long and hard road from her difficult…

Our editors share a few of the most memorable books they read in 2022. Michelle Bailat-Jones, translations editor Three recent(ish) translations stood out from the rest of my reading this year. The original languages and story cultures are as different as can be—Kannada, Arabic, Icelandic—but they remain connected for me on account of each writer’s…

First published as a series of viral Facebook posts, Stories of a Life: A Novel by Russian filmmaker Nataliya Meschaninova thrusts readers into the world of a miserable Russian teenager in all her eye-rolling, gum-snapping glory. Rendered into a convincingly young, headlong, and informal English by Fiona Bell, this brief novel puts a social media…

Each of the nineteen sharply faceted stories comprising In the Between: 21st Century Short Stories, edited by Brice Particelli, differently takes up the theme of being misunderstood. In this state — disregarded, disrespected, dissed — you’re not the person you’ve been mistaken for, but you’re not quite yourself either. You’re in the between. Anchoring the collection are powerful stories…

“And the days were made of auguries.” So begins Snow Crow, the sixth anthology of the best flash — short stories of three hundred words or less — from last year’s Bath Flash Fiction Award. Selected from a pool of nearly four thousand entries from sixty-four countries, Snow Crow collects a hundred and thirty-six stories…

In Quake, the English-language debut novel by award-winning Icelandic author Auður Jónsdóttir, a woman falls to the sidewalk in Reykjavik and wakes up in the hospital, having suffered a seizure that has all but erased her memory. It does return, but only slowly, in terrifying fragments. She has a young son. He was holding her…

In folklore, a Barghest is a huge dog with sharp teeth and claws; its appearance portends death. A different but no less frightening Barghest haunts Kayla Chenault’s These Bones. In this keen, smart, and unsettling debut novel, the residents of a besieged Black community known as the Bramble Patch seize moments of joy and redemption…