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…

The centuries-old Japanese artistic technique known as kintsugi involves repairing shattered objects with liquid gold. Kintsugi translates roughly, and poetically, to “golden joinery.” Imagine ceramic vessels spiderwebbed with gleaming yellow: broken dishes are not only made whole again but enhanced, interwoven with lustrous precious metal. In her autobiographical debut novel, Body Kintsugi, Bosnian writer Senka…

Rather than spreading wealth or creating better lives for their citizens, many modern governments are perfecting the art of breaking things. Old-fashioned torture combines with modern communication and surveillance in ways that break people through pain, destroy human connection by promulgating paranoia, and poison communities with fear.   Turkish writer Sevgi Soysal explores these somber themes…

Danger lurks beneath the surface of Rebecca Bernard’s Our Sister Who Will Not Die. The characters in Bernard’s eleven finely crafted short stories live on the cusp of hazard. From a mother struggling with rumors that she had sex with her recently deceased son to a librarian whose husband wants her to have an affair,…

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…

From Rosamond Lehmann to Tama Janowitz, women writers have sought to distil the modern feminine experience in tales that curl and pulse. Louise Marburg, who wrote You Have Reached Your Destination during the revelatory extremity of the Covid-19 lockdown, achieves a similar intensity as she peels away layers of so-called normality and respectability to reveal the mess…

The Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev lost touch with his writing while captured by pro-Russian militants in 2017. In “The Bell,” an excerpt from his memoir, Aseyev reclaims his art. “Writing, like boxing, required constant training,” he writes, and he finds himself “completely out of shape after being held captive.” This excerpt appears in Love in…

Jill Stukenberg’s debut News of the Air follows a family living in the Northwoods of Wisconsin in an eerily plausible climate disaster-affected future. The atmosphere is foreboding, and the area is increasingly deserted. Will Allie, Bud, and Cassie stay? It’s the suspense in this question—more accurately, this conflict—that drives the novel.   Allie Krane was pregnant…

Panics by Barbara Molinard reads like a classic in the making. First published in French as Viens in 1969, this new translation by Emma Ramadan conveys the essence of Molinard’s preoccupations. Each story contains a singular vision and a confident, haunting voice, and unfolds with the dull terror of a nightmare. The author’s biography is filled with captivating…

In “An Aura Surrounds That Night,” the novella that closes Tara Lynn Masih’s haunting new collection How We Disappear, Yellow Rose, a psychic, becomes a mentor to a grief-stricken girl named Mercy whom she suspects of having mystical gifts of her own. “You’ll never be able to look at this world the same way again, after this…

When I first visited the Basque Country, a region in northern Spain, I felt very close to the sea, as close as you can get while still keeping both feet on dry land. Kirmen Uribe’s Bilbao-New York-Bilbao gives readers a taste of this sea, as well as an intimacy with the lives connected to it.…

Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-Jim, translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang, is, at its core, a story about learning how to accept what one cannot change. This theme finds expression in the narrator’s relationship with her daughter. Readers could interpret the narrator, who remains nameless throughout, as eternally pessimistic. She says, early on,…