Our editors share a few of the most memorable books they read in 2021. Michelle Bailat-Jones, translations editor In 2021, my reading life was ruled by three different kinds of hunger: first, a continuation of my post-pandemic appetite for comfort reading and old favorites; second, an intermittent but intense craving for books that tackled issues…

The sixteen stories in this slim volume by Cheryl Pappas may be short, but they’re large-hearted and packed with beautiful nuggets of mystery and resonance. These micro and flash gems exist in surrealist or slightly off-kilter realms, and the style and form of the stories varies to pleasing effect. As the title suggests, the stories…

The female body has been studied, medicalized, regimented, and categorized by countless scientists and physicians throughout the ages. Glorified, idealized, and romanticized for its capacity to create life, it has also been simultaneously considered defective compared to the ideal male body, to the point that the condition of being female counts as a state of…

For the diasporic characters in The Infinite Library and Other Stories, the library and its infinite potential symbolize a visionary escape into a kind of afterlife where polyglotism and complex transnational backgrounds are inevitable facts. Victor Fernando R. Ocampo’s collection is simultaneously a meaningful addition to the genre of speculative fiction and a powerful manifesto…

Little Bird is a book of tiny, fabulous adventures. Its narrators — mostly women who seem estranged from themselves — tell stories as if from the middle of a tightrope strung between small buildings. Anything can happen: One woman goes to a job interview with a wounded bird in her coat pocket; another meets a…

“I didn’t know how to take care of someone,” declares Willa Chen at the beginning of Win Me Something. Kyle Lucia Wu’s debut novel asks: What are the costs of caring? What are the politics — racial, gendered, class-related — of caring for and being a part of a family? What does belonging mean to…

No Diving Allowed is a collection of lively, wily stories that creep up from behind to pack unexpected punches. In this glorious scrap-box of richly-patterned fragments, each story is an all-too-brief immersion in a fully-formed world. The linking theme is swimming pools, yet Louise Marburg’s writing is so deft that it takes a while for…

A man, a self-described idler, is crashing in an empty office for a few weeks, happily reading the same book over and over, when a call from a wrong number sparks a strange romance. He and the woman talk off and on for weeks. He never learns her name. Just when he overcomes his impish…

In Where You Come From, Saša Stanišić rifles through the prose writer’s toolbox, deploying autofiction, fable, metanarrative, lists, and choose-your-own-adventure to compose a complex story of memory, identity, politics, and exile from a nation that no longer exists. The novel follows a protagonist named Saša Stanišić as he flees Yugoslavia with his family and they…

Blue Postcards, a novella by Douglas Bruton, is at once song, poem, and scripture, and it is woven as tightly and expertly as the twisted tekhelet threads in a Jewish prayer shawl’s four tassels. Tekhelet, it is important to know, is an ancient blue-violet dye whose precise means of manufacture have been lost to time. The word is translated…

The title of Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, by Moroccan writer Meryem Alaoui, translated by Emma Ramadan, immediately hints at the novel’s central preoccupation: the ambiguous value of firsthand testimony from a witness not granted the privileges of a full humanity. What sort of creature is speaking, and what makes her account compelling? The novel’s…

The futuristic world described in Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes — published in 1995 in Taiwan and recently translated into English by Ari Larissa Heinrich — is an undersea civilization in the year 2100, when relentless ultraviolet rays force humankind to shelter on the ocean floor. Meanwhile, militarized cyborgs called “M units” roam the surface, where…