In Scenic Overlook, Anne Ray’s debut novel-in-stories, a young woman named Katie embarks on a long journey after her father’s death. Using the metaphor of the journey, Ray explores how fear and powerlessness rob Katie of her voice, confidence, and direction. Unable to connect with others in any deep way, Katie turns acting her own…

Set mainly in an economical seventeenth-floor apartment in Buenos Aires, The Delivery follows an unnamed narrator as she goes about her day, working up a story for an advertising agency and assembling a proposal for a creative writing grant. Following her estranged mother’s emergence from a sealed delivery crate, she also has some unexpected catching…

Doubt, secrecy, uncertain rebellion, shameful yearnings, erotic love—all the forces of youthful discontent animate Józef Czechowicz’s novella, The Story of the Paper Crown. Appearing in English for the first time, one hundred years after publication in a small avant-garde Polish magazine, the novella tracks Henryk, a brooding, Chekhovian protagonist, through fever dreams and philosophical ramblings…

Readers of Hiromi Kawakami’s story collection Dragon Palace may find themselves unsettled. Her book, which could have perhaps more accurately been titled “People and Gods,” offers tales of individuals’ interactions with shapeshifting animals, five hundred-year-old men, magical beings, and mythical Japanese deities.  Translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen, the eight stories take place in…

In Morse Code for Romantics, people search for love, romantic and familial, but are generally disappointed by it, as if love were written in a code no one knows how to read. Anne Baldo weaves myth, legend, and science into her stories, and her characters yearn for something unavailable in their daily lives—perhaps sea monsters,…

Our editors share a few of the most memorable books of the year Michelle Bailat-Jones, translations editor Translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison, Gerda Blees’ We Are Light (World Editions, 2023) is an innovative and riveting multi-vocal novel following three members of the Sound and Love Commune—who believe they can exist on light and love…

At its heart James Brubaker’s We Are Ghost Lit asks a simple question: What is grief for one lost life? Wrapped in cultural allusions, from Star Trek on the pop side to Borges on the literary, with a minimalist playlist for grief in the art-resisting mourning of Phil Elvrun, We Are Ghost Lit balances obsessively…

The New Animals by Pip Adam is a secretly speculative novel that follows a multi-generational group of people through one manic night in Auckland. It’s 2016, and the group is attempting to put on a fashion photoshoot in less than twenty-four hours. Everything’s chaotic: hair needs cutting, sample clothes haven’t arrived, and budgets are questionable.…

Imagine your life like this, Sarah Layden urges her readers in this collection of stories—and we can, all too easily. The characters who inhabit this collection exhibit at once frailty and strength, wisdom and profound stupidity, cruelty and compassion. Theirs is a world that’s easy to recognise, universal and personal in the same breath. Layden’s…

In Days & Days & Days, anxieties of money are ever present; money haunts everything. Bibbs, a Swedish actress and celebrity famous for blogging and reality TV, lives a life of financial security with her boyfriend, Baby, who “didn’t have a degree and hadn’t gone to university, but each month he was paid the same…

About a quarter of the way through Emily Grandy’s gorgeously written and expertly plotted debut novel, Michikusa House, her protagonist Winona (Win) asks: “Why does art always have to be about suffering?” Grandy’s novel answers the question by enacting another type of art. As the book opens, Win is a college nutrition major in recovery…

For its play with text and genres, its multiple female narrators, and its autobiographical underpinnings, A Book, Untitled, by Shushan Avagyan and its translator Deanna Cachoian-Schanz, might best be considered a thought experiment along the lines of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee. While recalling the metafictional tendencies of much Western postmodern fiction, it also evokes…