Forcing people to live in a gilded cage in order to harvest their organs and experiment on them: not a particularly original plot for a dystopia, of course, but still a fascinating vehicle for social critique. Swedish author Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) or the film The Island (2005), tells the story of middle-aged…

Josefine Klougart is a young Danish author (born in 1985) whose work is highly regarded in Scandinavia. Her style privileges images and language over narrative, and her work has been compared to that of Virginia Woolf and Marguerite Duras. Readers who are interested in plot- or character-driven narrative will not find either in Klougart’s work.…

Deepak Unnikrishnan’s novel Temporary People begins with a foreword in which he explains how he moved from the United Arab Emirates to the United States. In that process he apparently became an ‘immigrant of fortune’. The UAE though, is a country where 80% of the population are foreign nationals and have temporary citizenship, to help…

A quarter of a way into Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter the following stand-out line surfaces amidst a collage of anecdotes related to memorializing, burial practices, and grief writing: What does it mean to write what is not there. To write absence. The line sits on its own, separated out from a preceding block of…

Our editors share some of the books — new and old — that had our attention in 2017. + Helen McClory, fiction editor emerita I have read many excellent, punching, twisting books this year, notably Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You : Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife, Patty Yumi Cottrell’s…

With his debut novel Queen of Spades, Michael Shou-Yung Shum creates a literary link between two unlikely places — Imperial Russia in the 19th century and Snoqualmie, Washington in the 1980s. Shum’s novel is a spiritual successor to the Alexander Pushkin short story of the same name published in 1833. While the basic premise remains…

“The biggest lie of the patriarchy is to convince us women that we aren’t violent,” reads a postscript, scribbled at the end of a short story, which is mailed to an FBI agent by a female professor who knows that she’s being watched. Just an ordinary day in the world at the beginning of Rosalie…

Appearing this month in English translation, Mélissa Verrault’s 2014 novel Behind the Eyes We Meet (originally L’Angoisse du poisson rouge) unfolds as three major overlapping stories, spanning the present-day Plateau neighborhood of Montreal to the Russian labor camps active during the Second World War, to a small Italian town of both yesteryear and today. Throughout…

From the opening pages of The Disintegrations, the narrator asserts that he “knows nothing about death, absolutely nothing,” yet what follows is a sweeping chronicle of death that suggests a journey from ignorance to some hazy understanding of the afterlife. No greater knowledge of death is captured here, as language’s inability to decipher the void…

The most striking feature of Christopher Kang’s short story collection aside from its title, When He Sprang From His Bed, Staggered Backward, And Fell Dead, We Clung Together With Faint Hearts, And Mutely Questioned Each Other, a story in itself, is the subtitle advertising that the book contains 880 stories. Due to this startling number,…

Lucy Biederman’s wonderfully inventive first book re-imagines The Papyrus of Ani, from the Book of the Dead (ca. 1250 B.C.E.) in a brisk, 70-page collection of vignettes she calls “spells.” She transports the reader from ancient Egypt across 5,000 years to the United States and into a metaphorical present-day tomb: a Walmart store. Biederman’s “Underworld”…

While not every story in Planet Grim is set on planet Earth, the book delivers on the “Grim.” Alex Behr’s debut story collection is a gritty wonderland of junkies, burnouts, and dreamers, with most of its stories centered on the forgotten, drug-addled underworlds of the Pacific Northwest. Hidden among tech giants, microbrews, and sleek suburbs,…