In Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, Aimee Parkison takes the beautiful, the lyrical, the emotional, and pins it tightly to the horrific, the satirical, and a sense of existential terror—an unsettling juxtaposition that leaves the reader both full and empty, singing and weeping. The twenty-three sparse stories of this thin, 83-page tome may give the…

Berit Ellingsen’s Vessel and Solsvart is a collection of five short, dark fairy tales, full of richly imaginative story weaving, and beautifully poetic language. Each story has a slightly different tone, a different feel, but all share a sense of the magical, the bizarre, or the straight up weird. The collection opens with the titular “Vessel and…

“Mothers were supposed to be fair,” laments Mitsuki Katsura, a middle-aged woman tasked with caring for Noriko, her terminally ill mother. This relationship is the center of gravity in Minae Mizumura’s Inheritance from Mother, a novel that tests the ties between mothers and daughters, between wives and husbands. But this is also the tale of…

The North American debut of Saikat Majumdar’s Play House was originally published in India as The Firebird and short-listed for the 2015 Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Prize in Fiction. Set in Calcutta in the mid-1980s, the novel follows young Ori’s obsession and fear over his mother’s career on the stage. From page 11, where, “On…

Like the genius that inspired it, Carlos Fonseca’s debut novel follows an unlikely trajectory: Introduced to the eponymous colonel near the end of his story, the reader assembles a life from episodes culled interchangeably from past, present, and apocalyptic future. Born in Mexico to an anarchist father and actress mother, the Colonel comes of age…

The title of A.J. Perry’s first book, Twelve Stories of Russia: A Novel, I Guess, presents the reader with an ambiguity. The novel, if that’s what it should be called, is narrated by a young American named James who, after reading an ad in the newspaper, moves to Moscow in the early 1990s to teach English.…

I Brake for Moose, Geeta Kothari’s debut story collection, throws into sharp focus the conflicts between identity and culture in a globalized world. In these eleven subtly connected stories, Kothari explores the deep challenges to self, presented by an uncompromising American value system that seeks to erase difference and make invisible the humanity of those…

In the back corner of El Floridita, a cocktail bar in Old Havana, a life-size bronze statue of Ernest Hemingway encourages tourists to pose for selfies and knock back daiquiris at $7 apiece—about 30% of the monthly income of the Cuban workers passing by outside. Hemingway, who once split his time between the hedonist’s playground…

Apocalyptic fiction was already a mainstay of twenty-first century literature, but the political climate of the past year has only made the threat of an impending doomsday a more frightening possibility. Fiction writers not already pondering climate change catastrophes, pandemics, or fascist regimes still have time to consider the end days, however. 2017 begins with…

We’d rather believe he’s speaking figuratively: “Agnes is dead. Killed by a story.” So read the opening lines of a novel named for a maybe-dead woman. He (the nameless narrator) goes on to tell us that he and Agnes met nine months ago, at the Chicago Public Library. They became lovers. Reflecting on it now,…

Ellen Meeropol writes novels in the tradition of such authors as Barbara Kingsolver, Rosellen Brown, and Paule Marshall. Whether termed radical, political, or socially engaged, hers is fiction that addresses the impact of culture and politics on human relationships. Meeropol attacks issues head-on but with subtlety, posing complex ethical dilemmas in prose both literary and…

Slovene journalist Jela Krečič, known for her contributions to Slovenia’s national paper Delo, where she published her 2013 interview with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, has arrived with her first literary endeavor. None Like Her, a novel translated from the Slovenian by Olivia Hellewell, and one of the first titles in the Peter Owen World Series in association…