When I was nine or ten, my family vacationed at Disney World. The Magic Kingdom was indeed magical, though the aspect that remains hooked in my memory thirty years later isn’t the Florida sunshine, or my autographs from Mickey and Minnie, but the Carousel of Progress.  Situated inside a futuristic-themed Tomorrowland, the Carousel of Progress…

Few of the characters in The Company of Strangers, Jen Michalski’s third collection of short stories, meet as literal strangers. Rather, Michalski relays states of strangeness forged in breakups, homecomings, familial estrangement, and immature love. Whether the relationships are new or long-term, Michalski’s characters form intimacies by pushing and pulling each other into altered states.…

This collection of dizzying and dazzling dystopian fairytales propels the reader through a sexually intriguing, violent, shy, erudite, and disingenuous mind—think Glee Club and High School Musical meet American Psycho. In these stories, image and surface are exploited and controlled by a series of sexually obsessed narrators. “You are only whatever text I write across…

Anca L. Szilágyi’s latest novel, Dreams Under Glass, follows Binnie, an aspiring diorama artist and struggling millennial dealing with her quarter-life crisis while trying to survive in New York City. She has a decent job as a paralegal, a job she must keep while finding time to fulfill her creative ambitions and social obligations. When…

In describing No Windmills in Basra by Diaa Jubaili, translated from Arabic by Chip Rossetti, it’s tempting simply to list the fantastic: stars cascade out of a woman’s hair; a lark searches for disappearing dimples; a boy oozes salt from his pores, an excrescence “his aunts on his mother’s side would have preferred it were…

Bay Area-writer Emil DeAndreis’s compulsively readable novel, Tell Us When To Go, begins with an ending: the denouement of Cole Gallegos’s baseball career. A once-promising prospect destined to make millions, Cole develops a case of the “yips,” and his skills suddenly vanish. After a few months of struggle, and an impulsive early retirement, Cole escapes…

The Memory of the Air by Belgian writer Caroline Lamarche, translated from the French by Katherine Gregor, is a novella about relationships, trauma, and the abuse of power. In this novella, presented as a monologue, an anonymous female narrator comes to terms with sexual trauma and an abusive relationship, the details of which slowly unfold…

Our editors share a few of the most memorable books they read in 2022. Michelle Bailat-Jones, translations editor Three recent(ish) translations stood out from the rest of my reading this year. The original languages and story cultures are as different as can be—Kannada, Arabic, Icelandic—but they remain connected for me on account of each writer’s…

The centuries-old Japanese artistic technique known as kintsugi involves repairing shattered objects with liquid gold. Kintsugi translates roughly, and poetically, to “golden joinery.” Imagine ceramic vessels spiderwebbed with gleaming yellow: broken dishes are not only made whole again but enhanced, interwoven with lustrous precious metal. In her autobiographical debut novel, Body Kintsugi, Bosnian writer Senka…

Rather than spreading wealth or creating better lives for their citizens, many modern governments are perfecting the art of breaking things. Old-fashioned torture combines with modern communication and surveillance in ways that break people through pain, destroy human connection by promulgating paranoia, and poison communities with fear.   Turkish writer Sevgi Soysal explores these somber themes…

Danger lurks beneath the surface of Rebecca Bernard’s Our Sister Who Will Not Die. The characters in Bernard’s eleven finely crafted short stories live on the cusp of hazard. From a mother struggling with rumors that she had sex with her recently deceased son to a librarian whose husband wants her to have an affair,…

First published as a series of viral Facebook posts, Stories of a Life: A Novel by Russian filmmaker Nataliya Meschaninova thrusts readers into the world of a miserable Russian teenager in all her eye-rolling, gum-snapping glory. Rendered into a convincingly young, headlong, and informal English by Fiona Bell, this brief novel puts a social media…