In 1958, the diverse population of Amdo—one of the three Tibetan regions, spanning modern-day Qinghai, Gansu, and Sichuan, and home to Tibetans, Han Chinese, Hui Muslims, and Mongols——rose up against the Chinese Communist Party in response to the party’s attempt at collectivization. The Red Wind Howls tells of the rebellion’s aftermath, during which Tibetans suffered…

The Shadow of the Mammoth is the latest of Fabio Morábito’s work to be translated into English, and his second collection of short prose. In it, he brings together eighteen short stories, anecdotes, essays, and fables; though the genres vary, all are thought experiments driven by unusual premises, with unexpected outcomes. A labyrinthine fun house,…

In “Domestication,” one of the twenty-eight stories in Lauren D. Woods’s smart and memorable collection, The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe, two adolescents play in an abandoned house that’s surrounded by coyotes. The pair pretend to be married, although the unnamed protagonist qualifies that she and Christopher “aren’t in love and don’t want to be.”…

This short novel will offend some readers. Strange, because anyone who reads past the dedication should know what they’ve picked up: “For all the hot queer sluts. You know who you are.” Still, pearls will be clutched. If it were up to Rebekah, the book’s emotional-vampire protagonist, those pearls would also be twisted around an…

Adolescence is pervaded by a sense of waiting, its long days and longer nights blanketed in the lethargy of teenage time. In her debut novel, Alice Chadwick captures this sensation vividly and compassionately with a story set on a single sultry day near the end of the school year.  Two events erupt in the book’s…

Set somewhere between the undifferentiated everywhere of girlhood and the specificity of contemporary New York’s art world, Lonesome Ballroom is a delightfully ambitious satire of the cultural legacy of femininity. Starting with a scene that’s a caricature of domestic discontent—upended plates of duck à l’orange, accusations of infidelity—the book balloons into an exploration of one…

In The Summer House, Masashi Matsuie depicts a young architect’s coming-of-age. The novel follows Tōru Sakanishi at his first job out of architecture school, as he joins a Tokyo-based firm, Murai Office, on their annual summer retreat to a mountain town. While at the Summer House, the team enters a highly-selective competition to construct a…

An ode to language and memory, Child of Light is an experimental historical novel that is nominally about the arrival, in the nineteenth century, of widespread electrification in the United States but is also, and more deeply, about the competing claims of science and spirituality as ways of understanding reality.  After being apart from her…

In Audition, Pip Adam interested in finding ways to address the harms that people do to one another, and how society makes the people it doesn’t value disappear.   The first third of this ambitious novel is taken up by a single conversation. Three giants, each more than eighteen feet tall, live on a spaceship where…

Makenna Goodman’s Helen of Nowhere is a comedic indictment of male entitlement. Its middle-aged protagonist, known only as “Man,” is a professor grappling with his own irrelevance. His wife has left him, and he’s lost his job at his university, thanks to new female colleagues who critiqued his scholarship and confronted him about his laziness.…

Make Your Way Home, Carrie R. Moore’s debut collection, is a poetic, bittersweet blending of past and present that delivers a smart moral jolt. Permeating these eleven expertly told stories of contemporary Black life in the American Deep South is a cautious optimism that acknowledges the damages of the past. An overture to the whole…

In Happy New Years by Maya Arad, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen, the narrator, Leah Moskovich, writes an annual Rosh Hashanah letter to her college classmates. These letters cover fifty years from 1966 to 2016, most of which Leah spends in the United States after she moves there from Israel to take a…