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…

At the start of Holly M. Wendt’s compassionate debut novel, Heading North, two hockey players, who are also secret lovers, train on a frozen canal in the deep night. The setting shows the score: “the ice hums, a thin crack somewhere between them, an easing settle. The canal’s meter of water is the least of…

The virgin, the whore, the mother, the maid—these symbolic containers have long relegated women to harmfully confining roles that reinforce a patriarchal system desperately in need of disruption. Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women, an anthology edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley, challenges this system by allowing the female characters to be  not…

Blood Feast by Malika Moustadraf is a collection of stories told from the perspectives of Moroccan people navigating largely unceremonious yet indelible moments of their lives. The stories are remarkably transparent, in the sense that each story captures the raw experience of living as a working-class person, a woman, or a queer individual in a…

As Jazmina Barrera teaches both directly and indirectly, to weave is to compose. Her multifaceted debut novel Cross-Stitch initiates readers into the rich history and craft of needlework. For its narrator Mila (Mílada), the art simultaneously fuels and is fueled by close bonds with the women, her dearest friends, who form her inner circle: the…

In Scenic Overlook, Anne Ray’s debut novel-in-stories, a young woman named Katie embarks on a long journey after her father’s death. Using the metaphor of the journey, Ray explores how fear and powerlessness rob Katie of her voice, confidence, and direction. Unable to connect with others in any deep way, Katie turns acting her own…

Set mainly in an economical seventeenth-floor apartment in Buenos Aires, The Delivery follows an unnamed narrator as she goes about her day, working up a story for an advertising agency and assembling a proposal for a creative writing grant. Following her estranged mother’s emergence from a sealed delivery crate, she also has some unexpected catching…

Doubt, secrecy, uncertain rebellion, shameful yearnings, erotic love—all the forces of youthful discontent animate Józef Czechowicz’s novella, The Story of the Paper Crown. Appearing in English for the first time, one hundred years after publication in a small avant-garde Polish magazine, the novella tracks Henryk, a brooding, Chekhovian protagonist, through fever dreams and philosophical ramblings…

Readers of Hiromi Kawakami’s story collection Dragon Palace may find themselves unsettled. Her book, which could have perhaps more accurately been titled “People and Gods,” offers tales of individuals’ interactions with shapeshifting animals, five hundred-year-old men, magical beings, and mythical Japanese deities.  Translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen, the eight stories take place in…

In Morse Code for Romantics, people search for love, romantic and familial, but are generally disappointed by it, as if love were written in a code no one knows how to read. Anne Baldo weaves myth, legend, and science into her stories, and her characters yearn for something unavailable in their daily lives—perhaps sea monsters,…

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…

At its heart James Brubaker’s We Are Ghost Lit asks a simple question: What is grief for one lost life? Wrapped in cultural allusions, from Star Trek on the pop side to Borges on the literary, with a minimalist playlist for grief in the art-resisting mourning of Phil Elvrun, We Are Ghost Lit balances obsessively…