“In the end, we’re all free because in the end, we’ll be dead.” This fatalistic maxim is the epigraph of Ana Paula Maia’s slim novel On Earth As It Is Beneath, translated by Padma Viswanathan from the Portuguese. Linking liberation to death, the phrase is attributed to Bronco Gil, a prison inmate who first appears…

In Chi Zijian’s The Last Quarter of the Moon, the nameless narrator, an elder of the Evenki – nomadic reindeer herders in northeast China – recounts her ninety years of life. The loves and losses of her private world reflect outward changes as modernity, nation-building, and the extraction of local natural resources encroach upon her…

Sara Levine has mastered at least two of the linchpins of compelling fiction: an irresistible narrative voice and a fatally flawed protagonist. Her debut novel, Treasure Island!!! (2011) featured an unreliable (and unhinged) narrator who kickstarts her life by embracing what she considers the “core values” of Robert Louis Stevenson’s original Treasure Island: “Boldness! Resolution!…

Having a young child who loves stories allows me the singular joy of rehashing all my favorites. Every night we’ve been reading through a compilation of monsters from classic literature. We’ve talked about Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, the Kraken, and the Yeti. He’s always asking, “But are they real?” Lauren Bolger’s novel The Barre…

Carlos Manuel Álvarez’s hard-hitting False War, rendered perceptively in English by Natasha Wimmer, is a disorienting novel of narrative destabilization and polyphonic translation. Eschewing a linear plot, Álvarez’s montage of fragmentary portraits reveals the fraught heterogeneity of Cuban emigrants’ experiences.  This disunity of perspective is evident in the novel’s structure, which comprises short sections with…

Pandora begins with a pangolin clinging tightly to the right leg of a woman wearing a single high heel “to make up for the imbalance caused by the creature.” Within pages, the pangolin has decided and failed to become a professor, gotten himself banned from broadcasting on Facebook Live, and begun to domestically abuse the…

Geri Lipschultz’s Grace Before the Fall is a book of madness and wonders. The foreword, by John Irving, invites the reader to think of the book as “magical realism meets Alice in Wonderland.” But magical realism is grounded in realism in ways that Grace Before the Fall is not and doesn’t aspire to be. This…

In this era of bite-sized attention spans, certain novels remind you that it’s worth appreciating, from time to time, the distinctive power of the form. Along with the television series, where writers have resources to probe extended storylines and complex characters, the novel is well suited to negotiating our stickiest quandaries. The Nights are Quiet…

Tidal Lock, Lindsay Hill’s second novel, might just as easily be called a commonplace book or a work of long-form  prose poetry. Essay, story, case study, character sketch, or something in between, what Tidal Lock offers is undeniably beautiful and haunting. The novel is at once an elegy to consciousness overwhelmed by grief and a…

Simone in Pieces tells the story of Simone Lerrante, a Belgian war orphan and child refugee. Her story unfolds through multiple points of view, shifting between the Simone and those whose lives intersect with hers. These shifting perspectives invite the reader to build their own understanding of her, piece by piece, in a process that…

Hailed in 1983 by Italo Calvino as “a classic of contemporary Italian literature,” Daniele del Giudici’s A Fictional Inquiry, recently published for the first time in English, consists of a mundane plot blanketed in dreamlike haze. Illustrating the inexplicable strangeness of living in an uncertain political landscape, del Giudice transforms a straightforward story into a…

In 1999, as Macau teeters on the edge of its handover from Portugal to China, an assassin named Kotter interrogates Breughel, a failed novelist, in a grimy room tucked away in a dingy alley. Kotter is looking for Gloria Vancouver, Breughel’s lover, who has embezzled a large sum of money from a shadowy international syndicate.…