In My Days of Dark Green Euphoria, A.E. Copenhaver reworks the age-old clash of generations, placing that story in a contemporary setting just as Western civilisation appears ready to disappear up its own fundament in a puff of carbon-neutral, gender-neutral, offense-neutral smoke. Slyly and deftly, the author skewers millennials as the risk-averse generation that invented…

In the title story from Hollows, Tommy Dean’s new collection of flash fiction, two teenage boys lie in a street. One asks the other what they’re doing there. ‘We’re dying. Can’t you feel it?’ your voice oozing with smoke rather than tears. No, I want to say, but there’s a code here, a puzzle that…

“Alexander’s the one who taught me all the rules,” says Karl Gustav, the narrator of Mads Nygaard’s coming-of-age novel When Me and God Were Little. Alexander is little Karl Gustav’s much older brother, and he has drowned in the North Sea. Their father, a boisterous boozer with a penchant for creative accounting, soon ends up…

A writer choosing their subject shows the world what they care about, what they obsess about, what keeps them up at night and away from the rest of their lives. Given the intense vulnerability of that decision, writers often keep their reasons under wraps. In Karolina Romqvist’s Bear Woman, this is not the case: this…

Like a vibrant quilt, Namrata Poddar’s novel Border Less presents the elaborately patterned lives of single mothers, Nepali maids, workers in Mumbai luxury hotels, and immigrant wives who come together to develop strong friendships. Along the way, Poddar, a vivacious storyteller, portrays an extensive range of Rajasthani arts, including painting and dance, and Marwari havelis…

Marzahn, a Kiez of Berlin, one of the city’s twenty unofficial boroughs, is known for its massive, prefab apartment blocks built from the gray GDR-era concrete. In Marzahn, Mon Amour, the English-language debut of German writer Katja Oskamp, the district becomes a kaleidoscope of quotidian experience, collective history, and unexpected intimacy. The novel opens with…

Caren Beilin’s Revenge of the Scapegoat begins with a simple declarative statement — I was upset — that unfolds into a surreal yet logical fever dream. The novel’s protagonist, Iris, receives a letter from her father that he wrote when she was a teenager, in which he blames her for leaving their dysfunctional family. This…

Little Foxes Took Up Matches is set in Russia, and I am reviewing this liberatingly slippery novel just as war has spilled out from that country. Katya Kazbek, whose heritage is Russian, Ukrainian, Greek, and Jewish, and who writes in both Russian and English, might be the perfect indefinable author for such strange binary times,…

Sara Lippmann’s Jerks is a book you can indeed judge by its cover. While the retro photo of two tennis players shaking hands is comical and fun, an undeniably rich story is packed into the image, which hints at hidden depths. Are these seemingly civil people as nice as they appear? The image neatly sums up Lippmann’s…

Jeanne, expert crafter of artificial flowers, is on a tram in Paris in 1918. A soldier with horrific facial injuries enters her carriage, causing the crowd to “turn and flinch away … half-pitying, half-appalled … The whole structure of his face has been destroyed.” The passengers, electrified, react with horrified sympathy; children are exhorted to…

In Quake, the English-language debut novel by award-winning Icelandic author Auður Jónsdóttir, a woman falls to the sidewalk in Reykjavik and wakes up in the hospital, having suffered a seizure that has all but erased her memory. It does return, but only slowly, in terrifying fragments. She has a young son. He was holding her…

Like all of us these days, Jared Joseph has scorched earth. I am here to write a book review and have just realized that there may be no actual book for it to be about. The Table of Contents for A Book About Myself Called Hell lists three sections: “Preface to a Book;” “Critical Commentary…