Carolina Pihelgas’ The Cut Line is two things at once: a classic story about a bad breakup, and thoughtful geopolitical fable. Gorgeously translated from the Estonian by Daisy Hurford, the novel follows Liine, a middle-aged woman who flees her life in the city of Tartu, in southern Estonia, in an attempt to escape an abusive…

How We See the Gray, Rachel León’s debut novel, immerses the reader in the child welfare system. At one point, the team of social workers looks at mugshots online and plays a game to guess what each person did to end up in jail. The team genuinely cares about their work; they are just blowing…

Having neither a beginning nor an end, a perfect circle is continuous—a loop made of points equidistant from a fixed center. How fitting, then, that Claudia Petrucci’s The Perfect Circle, translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel, resists a singular beginning. Instead of starting from a single point in time, the novel cycles between…

In migration tales, a distinction prevails between those called “immigrants” and others known as “expats.” The latter are usually white and rich, or at least, richer than immigrants. Implicit in their privilege is the fact that desire, not need, has compelled them to leave their home countries. They can also choose to travel between their…

Often told in women’s voices, McConnell’s stories in this collection range in time from the 1930s to the Covid-19 pandemic and take place in a transatlantic world, ranging from Italy and Puerto Rico to California, New York City, and the American Midwest. While McConnell’s women sometimes find themselves through their lovers, they also strive for…

“I need to travel to purge myself of Sweden and Swedish stupidity,” wrote August Strindberg in a letter to his editor in 1884. Renowned for his itchy feet, the celebrated Swedish playwright travelled extensively throughout his lifetime, living in dozens of different places in Stockholm and abroad. Yet he spent the vast majority of his…

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…