What becomes of awful people? The Angolan-Portuguese writer Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’sThree Stories of Forgetting, sensitively translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin, offers one answer, in the form of a triptych of novella-length character studies of more-or-less awful men. All are old enough to be constantly dogged by rumors of their own mortality, and…

Queen by Birgitta Trotzig is a novel that churns with the logic of its landscape—beautiful, bleak, alien, cold, callous, and cruel. Here, the poverty of the rural landscape becomes a vehicle for the cycles of trauma in the text: how we become hurt, how we hurt others, and then how we cope. But just as…

Mount Verity, the topographical namesake of Therese Bohman’s recent novel, is hallowed ground. A visitor who stands long enough on its plateau, or in the surrounding dark forest, might hear women whispering. Theirs are the muffled voices of those who died—or, as legend has it, disappeared into the mountain—during the seventeenth-century witch trials. If that…

Marcel Proust, while famously reflecting on a madeleine dipped in tea, wrote in Swann’s Way that attempting to recapture the past “is a labour in vain” because “the truth lies not in the cup but in myself.” Unlike Proust, who remembers his mother with an obsessive fondness, Aleksy, the narrator of Tatiana Țîbuleac’s brief novel,…

Yano Akira is an editor for a Tokyo publishing house whose salaryman lifestyle has begun to bore him. Enter Koharu, a Hungarian love doll who comes to life upon moving in with Akira. Mistress Koharu, the second of Noburu Tsujihara’s works to be translated into English, follows Akira in the time after his purchase of…

Farah Ali’s Telegraphy pulls off quite the literary feat: it manages to make a ghoulish fascination with human bodies—living, dead and transitioning from the former to the latter—into something ethereal, a necessarily spiritual preoccupation.  Sustained by the remarkable, otherworldly voice of its narrator, Telegraphy tells the story of Annie, a woman born in Pakistan in…

“In the end, we’re all free because in the end, we’ll be dead.” This fatalistic maxim is the epigraph of Ana Paula Maia’s slim novel On Earth As It Is Beneath, translated by Padma Viswanathan from the Portuguese. Linking liberation to death, the phrase is attributed to Bronco Gil, a prison inmate who first appears…

In Chi Zijian’s The Last Quarter of the Moon, the nameless narrator, an elder of the Evenki – nomadic reindeer herders in northeast China – recounts her ninety years of life. The loves and losses of her private world reflect outward changes as modernity, nation-building, and the extraction of local natural resources encroach upon her…

Sara Levine has mastered at least two of the linchpins of compelling fiction: an irresistible narrative voice and a fatally flawed protagonist. Her debut novel, Treasure Island!!! (2011) featured an unreliable (and unhinged) narrator who kickstarts her life by embracing what she considers the “core values” of Robert Louis Stevenson’s original Treasure Island: “Boldness! Resolution!…

Having a young child who loves stories allows me the singular joy of rehashing all my favorites. Every night we’ve been reading through a compilation of monsters from classic literature. We’ve talked about Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, the Kraken, and the Yeti. He’s always asking, “But are they real?” Lauren Bolger’s novel The Barre…

Carlos Manuel Álvarez’s hard-hitting False War, rendered perceptively in English by Natasha Wimmer, is a disorienting novel of narrative destabilization and polyphonic translation. Eschewing a linear plot, Álvarez’s montage of fragmentary portraits reveals the fraught heterogeneity of Cuban emigrants’ experiences.  This disunity of perspective is evident in the novel’s structure, which comprises short sections with…

Pandora begins with a pangolin clinging tightly to the right leg of a woman wearing a single high heel “to make up for the imbalance caused by the creature.” Within pages, the pangolin has decided and failed to become a professor, gotten himself banned from broadcasting on Facebook Live, and begun to domestically abuse the…