The central premise of The Abyss by the Tamil writer Jeyamohan is the philosophical question of existence: What makes us human?  Or, to put it more bluntly, as Jeyamohan lays out in an interview with his translator, Suchitra Ramachandran: “If you subject human beings to an acid test, what remains?”  To explore this question, Jeyamohan…

Early in Hanna Johansson’s Body Double, two women discuss the destabilizing experience of being left behind. The women, Naomi and Laura, have met by chance in a department store cafe after Naomi accidentally takes Laura’s coat, which is identical to hers. She returns it immediately, and over coffee Naomi confesses that the experience of being…

The latest short story collection by Xu Xi, Horizon Hong Kong features Hong Kongers forging relationships and means of survival in their evolving home city and abroad. Split into five sections, the collection depicts the changing shape of Hong Kong, particularly in the years before and after its handover from the British to the Chinese…

This slim ninety-page volume consists of three stories and bears a title inviting feminist interpretation. We Were Forbidden is provocative: Who are “we” and what is forbidden to “us”? Raising these two questions, the author, Jacqueline Harpman, a psychoanalyst whose first novel, I Who Have Never Known Men was last year’s breakout Tiktok success, implicitly…

Our editors share some suggestions for the season ahead

In the title story of Emily Mitchell’s most recent collection, The Church of Divine Electricity, a young woman returns to the home of her parents, and her life, once troubled, seems back on track—that is, until she shows up with an eight-pointed star on her forehead that signifies her decision to volunteer for the transhuman…

Hidden River, a memorable novel-in-flash by Sara Lippmann, opens with 35-year-old Cassie, the narrator, receiving an overseas wedding invitation from Sally Sellers, with whom she’s been out of touch for many years. The Sellers family once offered Cassie the illusion of stability; it is unclear what they may offer her now. Though it is written…

In a remote Australian mountain forest there is a black orchid. It is the last of its species: an endling. As Keely Jobe’s debut novel The Endling begins, the orchid decides that “for the sake of its kind, it will hold on a little longer. It won’t flounder. It will remember the way the orchids…

At the start of Nice Places, Vincent Chu’s debut novel, twenty-something Georgie loses his job at a soulless corporation. Instead of coming clean about his lack of future plans, and despite having never gone anywhere on his own, Georgie tells his colleagues he is quitting to travel the world—and promptly starts an Instagram account to…

Winner of the 1955 Nobel Prize, Halldór Laxness wrote novels, essays, plays, and translations, and was a champion of Iceland, its history, and its people. In this novel, published in Icelandic in 1970, Laxness takes readers on a stroll through Icelandic history, a history with few documents and populated by invisible men and women.

Susanna Crossman’s novel, The Orange Notebooks, is a compelling study of grief’s many colors.

Joan Silber’s novel In the City opens with a deeply familiar gesture: a teenage girl leaves home to assimilate herself into a romanticized bohemian subculture. Pauline, a Jewish girl from Newark, possesses the boldness and vanity one might expect of a young woman who wants nothing less than the admiration and attachment of “a circle…