In Cuba in 1993, daily life was a series of mathematical calculations. There were the calculations of rations, of loved ones who had emigrated and the percentage of friends who remained (for now) and, above all, of the odds that things would ever improve. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which ended the subsidies…

If there are definitive themes to be found in Ethel Rohan’s new collection of stories, one is Ireland, and the other is men — how they arrive from over the hill, under the bridge, at the side of the road, and bring with them their world. They rise from the Irish countryside and the American…

The greatest pleasures of Rikki Ducornet’s Trafik are linguistic, or, more accurately, they are sonic, tactile — in a word, sensual. Consider this early passage, which not only captures the book’s tone, rhythm, and playful humor but also introduces one of its character’s obsession with the sensual qualities of objects: For Mic, the Lights are…

Tropicália, a ripe morsel of a short story collection by Ananda Lima, offers three tightly-wound speculative satires that are hard to swallow but exciting to read. If you were to pitch the stories in the collection — for instance, the opening “Antropófaga,” in which a grieving Brazilian immigrant woman ingests bite-size, foil-wrapped Americans straight from…

Many in our culture are fascinated by polygamy, a popular topic of reality TV, dramas, and news media coverage. It is hard to look away when these stories focus on the most shocking details; almost everyone has seen images of women and young girls in long, buttoned-up dresses and old-fashioned, almost otherworldly hairstyles, their uniformity…

Close to the end of Frances Macken’s debut novel You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here, Katie, the narrator, visits Evelyn, her lifelong friend. The characters are now in their early twenties and still living in their hometown Glenbruff, a fictionalized rural community in the west of Ireland. Evelyn is distraught, and she…

The drama of Bluebeard, the original fatal husband, turns mainly upon a locked door. After bringing his bride to his castle of dangerously explorable rooms, he points out the locked one and hands her the key — which she is under no circumstances permitted to use. Consumed by her need to know, which his prohibition…

Minae Mizimura’s second novel, An I-Novel, is experimental: it is the first bilingual novel printed horizontally in Japanese. It follows a day in the life of Minae, a 30-some-year-old Ph.D. in French literature at an Ivy League school, who is holed up in an apartment rife with reminders of her ex-boyfriend. Her apartment is practically…

Some disaster stories are aftermath stories. What happens after the [volcano erupts/bomb goes off/levees break/insert other crisis here]? What was the scale of the devastation? How does life go on post-catastrophe? In contrast, Faultland by Suzy Vitello deals only briefly in what happens after a deadly 6.9 magnitude earthquake ravages a post-pandemic Portland, Oregon in…

Most Filipinos know at least four languages — English and Tagalog, the two official national languages, plus legacy Spanish and a more localized language (or two or three). This multiplicity is aptly represented in Ulirát, an unprecedented collection of short stories that includes translations from seven of the more than one hundred languages of the…

One Saturday in October 1990, three women hit the road in a rusty blue Oldsmobile, heading out from Caudell, a small West Virginia town. One woman carries an oxygen tank. Another bears the bruises her husband has left on her face and arms. The last, the driver and our narrator, hauls the dead weight of…

The sheer number of people killed by COVID-19 makes it meaningless to say any other viral epidemic was “worse,” but the suffering and torture inflicted on Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak from March 2014 to June 2016 go beyond what anyone wants to imagine. For the Ivorian novelist Véronique Tadjo, it’s…