So peruse below! What are you picking up? And, at the end of the string of books, please find a few interesting statistics that show just how rich the longlist is in terms of countries and languages represented, not to mention the number of publishers doing the hard work of bringing us these books.<\/p>\n
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From one of the most innovative and subversive novelists writing in French, a \u201cwriter of exceptional and original gifts\u201d (The New York Times<\/em>), whose Texaco<\/em> won the Prix Goncourt and has been translated into fourteen languages, Patrick Chamoiseau\u2019s Slave Old Man<\/em> is a gripping, profoundly unsettling story of an elderly slave\u2019s daring escape into the wild from a plantation in Martinique, with his master and a fearsome hound on his heels.<\/p>\n We follow them into a lush rain forest where nature is beyond all human control: sinister, yet entrancing and even exhilarating, because the old man\u2019s flight to freedom will transform them all in truly astonishing\u2014even otherworldly\u2014ways, as the overwhelming physical presence of the forest reshapes reality and time itself. Chamoiseau\u2019s exquisitely rendered new novel is an adventure for all time, one that fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs in vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose. Offering a loving and mischievous tribute to the Creole culture of Martinique and brilliantly translated by Linda Coverdale, this novel takes us on a unique and moving journey into the heart of Caribbean history.<\/p>\n Pushed beyond the roles imposed by their common master, man and mastiff unravel a knot of domination that can\u2019t be maintained without the subordination of animals to human beings, wilderness to \u201ccivilization.\u201d The sparks from their contest kindle this bonfire of a book, a maroon story written with \u201ca folktale parlance and a runner\u2019s wind.\u201d ~Julian Lucas,\u00a0The New Yorker Times<\/em><\/p>\n These insights into his mental strength show how the old man manages to persevere through a fall into a wellspring, branches that leave him \u201ccovered in bright blood and scabs,\u201d and an encounter with a viper, en route to the book\u2019s climactic confrontation. Chamoiseau\u2019s prose is astounding in its beauty\u2014and is notable for its blending of French and Creole\u2014and he ups the stakes by making this novel a breathtaking thriller, as well. ~Publishers Weekly (starred review)<\/p>\n With\u00a0characteristic wit and narrative force, Fox<\/i> takes us from Russia to Japan, through Balkan minefields and American road trips, and from the 1920s to the present, as it explores the power of storytelling and literary invention, notions of betrayal, and the randomness of human lives and biographies.<\/p>\n Using the duplicitous and shape-shifting fox of Eastern folklore as a motif, Ugresic constructs a novel that reinvents itself over and over, blending nuggets of literary trivia (like how Nabokov named the Neonympha dorothea dorothea<\/i> butterfly after the woman who drove him cross-country), with the timeless story of a woman trying to escape her hometown and find love to magical effect.<\/p>\n Propelled by literary footnotes and \u201cminor\u201d characters, Fox<\/i> is vintage Ugresic, recovering the voices of those on the margins with a verve that\u2019s impassioned, learned, and hilarious.<\/p>\n Almost meandering, in its six distinct parts, Fox<\/i> is an expansive and thought-provoking read, both enjoyable and moving. It stands well enough on its own, too, but is also another welcome piece of the larger, very much of-a-piece Ugresic \u0153uvre as a whole. ~M.A. Orthofer,\u00a0The Complete Review<\/em><\/p>\n As Fox<\/em> convincingly demonstrates, \u201cWe are all footnotes, all of us in an unrelenting and desperate struggle . . . against vacuity.\u201d In part 3, the narrator invokes Scheherazade, a fox whose stories bought her time, to underscore how narrative, comprised of fact and fiction, helps us resist the void. In her story about how stories come to be written, Ugresic, another fox, has shaped a \u201ctruthfulness\u201d that embodies the power of art. ~Michele Levy,\u00a0World Literature Today<\/em><\/p>\n In a large country house shut off from the world by a gated garden, three young governesses responsible for the education of a group of little boys are preparing a party. The governesses, however, seem to spend more time running around in a state of frenzied desire than attending to the children\u2019s education. One of their main activities is lying in wait for any passing stranger, and then throwing themselves on him like drunken Maenads. The rest of the time they drift about in a kind of sated, melancholy calm, spied upon by an old man in the house opposite, who watches their goings-on through a telescope. As they hang paper lanterns and prepare for the ball in their own honor, and in honor of the little boys rolling hoops on the lawn, much is mysterious: one reviewer wrote of the book\u2019s \u201cdeceptively simple words and phrasing, the transparency of which works like a mirror reflecting back on the reader.\u201d<\/p>\n Written with the elegance of old French fables, the dark sensuality of Djuna Barnes and the subtle comedy of Robert Walser, this semi-deranged erotic fairy tale introduces American readers to the marvelous Anne Serre.<\/p>\n This novel\u2019s ideas about shame, constraint, lust and abandon are as subtle as the sex is frank, conveyed through insinuation and metaphor. \u201cThe Governesses\u201d is not a treatise but an aria, and one delivered with perfect pitch: a minor work, defiantly so, but the product of a significant talent. ~Parul Sehgal,\u00a0The New York Times<\/em><\/p>\n Told in surrealist bursts, this novella combines the dreaminess of Barbara Comyns, Aimee Bender, and Kathryn Davis with the fairy-tale eroticism of Angela Carter. ~Kirkus<\/p>\n D\u00e9zafi<\/i> is no ordinary zombie novel. In the hands of the great Haitian author known simply as Frank\u00e9tienne, zombification takes on a symbolic dimension that stands as a potent commentary on a country haunted by a history of slavery. Now this dynamic new translation brings this touchstone in Haitian literature to English-language readers for the first time.<\/p>\n Written in a provocative experimental style, with a myriad of voices and combining myth, poetry, allegory, magical realism, and social realism, D\u00e9zafi<\/i> tells the tale of a plantation that is run and worked by zombies for the financial benefit of the living owner. The owner’s daughter falls in love with a zombie and facilitates his transformation back into fully human form, leading to a rebellion that challenges the oppressive imbalance that had robbed the workers of their spirit. With the walking dead and bloody cockfights (the “d\u00e9zafi” of the title) as cultural metaphors for Haitian existence, Frank\u00e9tienne\u2019s novel is ultimately a powerful allegory of political and social liberation.<\/p>\n Scholars widely view Frank\u00e9tienne as Haiti\u2019s most important writer. He wrote what many consider the first modern novel entirely in Haitian Creole, \u201cDezafi,\u201d in 1975, and a play well known here that challenged political oppression, \u201cPelin Tet. ~Randal C. Archibold,\u00a0The New Yorker Times<\/em><\/p>\n The book is a literary and linguistic treasure that allows anyone interested in that period to delve into the complexity of Haitian history, culture, language, religion as well as issues of class, gender, identity, and power.” ~C\u00e9cile Accilien, Director of the Institute of Haitian Studies, University of Kansas<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Claudio’s apartment faces a wall. Rising from bed, he sets his feet on the floor at the same time, to ground himself.<\/p>\n Cecilia sits at her window, contemplating a cemetery, the radio her best companion. It seems at first that After the Winter<\/em>, which follows two lovers from long before they meet through the years after, departs considerably from Nettel\u2019s earlier obsessions with animals, insects, and the horror of the body. Yet it\u2019s still recognizably Nettelian in its crisp, straightforward sentences that build and build until profundity, or profound sentiment, sneaks up on the reader. ~Callum Angus,\u00a0The Los\u00a0Angeles Review of Books<\/i><\/p>\n Nettel\u2019s sharp, potent novel depicts how even the briefest relationship can affect the rest of a life. ~Publishers Weekly<\/p>\n How does a shy, traumatized boy overcome the shame, anger, and sadness that silence him? In Lion Cross Point<\/em>, celebrated Japanese author Masatsugu Ono turns his gentle pen to the mind of ten-year-old Takeru, who arrives at his family\u2019s home village amid a scorching summer, carrying memories of unspeakable acts against his mother and brother. As Takeru befriends Mitsuko, his new caretaker, and Saki, his spunky neighbor, he meets more of his mother\u2019s old friends, discovering her history and inching toward a new idea of family and home. All the while he begins to see a strange figure called Bunji — the same name as a delicate young boy who mysteriously vanished long ago on the village\u2019s breathtaking coastline at Lion Cross Point. At once a subtle portrayal of a child\u2019s sense of memory and community, an empowering exploration of how we find the words to encompass our trauma, and a spooky Japanese ghost story, Lion Cross Point<\/em> is gripping and poignant, reminiscent of Kenzabur? ?e\u2019s best work. Acts of heartless brutality mix with surprising moments of pure kindness, creating this utterly truthful, cathartic tale of an unforgettable young boy.<\/p>\n Lion Cross Point<\/em> is marked by a dichotomy between the inevitability of suffering and the potential for compassion within those moments. Being a child, Takeru is constantly at the mercy of others, and, time and time again, their decisions place him in painful situations. Every step of the way, though, there is someone to help carry him through it, creating a book that is equal parts heart-wrenching and heartwarming. ~Reid Bartholomew,\u00a0World Literature Today<\/em><\/p>\n Be forewarned. Angus Turvill\u2019s translation of Ono\u2019s prose is spare. The line between what\u2019s real and what\u2019s imaginary (or dead) in this novel is blurred. Not much actually happens<\/em> in \u201cLion Cross Point.\u201d\u00a0But the book\u2019s import, though subtle, is undeniably there. It\u2019s a mournful, but ultimately uplifting portrait of a boy trying to make sense of his seemingly shattered world in order to create a stronger, more hopeful future. ~Alexis Burling,\u00a0The San Francisco Chronicle<\/em><\/p>\n The surprise hit of the summer and winner of Japan\u2019s prestigious Akutagawa Prize, Convenience Store Woman<\/i> is the incomparable story of Keiko Furukura, a thirty-six-year-old Tokyo resident who has been working at the Hiiromachi \u201cSmile Mart\u201d for the past eighteen years. Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but in her convenience store, she is able to find peace and purpose with rules clearly delineated clearly by the store\u2019s manual, and copying her colleagues\u2019 dress, mannerisms, and speech. She plays the part of a \u201cnormal person\u201d excellently?more or less. Keiko is very happy, but those close to her pressure her to find a husband and a proper career, prompting her to take desperate action.<\/p>\n A sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures we all feel to conform, Convenience Store Woman<\/i> offers a brilliant depiction of a world hidden from view and a charming and fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine.<\/p>\n But, for all the disturbance and oddity in \u201cConvenience Store Woman,\u201d the book dares the reader to interpret it as a happy story about a woman who has managed to craft her own \u201cgood life.\u201d \u201cI could think of the me in the (store) window as a being with meaning,\u201d Keiko reflects, cocking an ear to the trancelike \u201cmusic reverberating on the other side of the glass.\u201d Murata does not judge her protagonist\u2019s path to fulfillment, nor does she spend too much time contemplating what it might mean to find transcendence in such work. Instead, she admires Keiko\u2019s quirk and lively boldness. To second-guess this woman would be to fall into her sister\u2019s trap: Mami is \u201cfar happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine.\u201d It may make readers anxious, but the book itself is tranquil\u2014dreamy, even\u2014rooting for its employee-store romance from the bottom of its synthetic heart. ~Katy Waldman,\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em><\/p>\n But these are minor quibbles and perhaps even missing the point. For it\u2019s the novel\u2019s cumulative, idiosyncratic poetry that lingers, attaining a weird, fluorescent kind of beauty all of its own. The world of the store with its dented cans and rice balls and barcodes and scanners, and Keiko\u2019s shivery, unashamedly sensual response as a \u201cconvenience store animal\u201d who can \u201chear the store\u2019s voice telling me what it wanted, how it wanted to be\u201d. The book\u2019s title is more than perfect, for this, you soon realise, is a love story. Keiko\u2019s love story: the convenience is all hers. ~Julie Myerson,\u00a0The Guardian<\/em><\/p>\n 1985. Kazumasa Yuuki, a seasoned reporter at the North Kanto Times<\/i>, runs a daily gauntlet of the power struggles and office politics that plague its newsroom. But when an air disaster of unprecedented scale occurs on the paper\u2019s doorstep, its staff is united by an unimaginable horror and a once-in-a-lifetime scoop.<\/p>\n 2003. Seventeen years later, Yuuki remembers the adrenaline-fueled, emotionally charged seven days that changed his and his colleagues\u2019 lives. He does so while making good on a promise he made that fateful week?one that holds the key to its last solved mystery and represents Yuuki\u2019s final, unconquered fear.<\/p>\n From Hideo Yokoyama, the celebrated author of Six Four<\/i>, comes Seventeen<\/i>?an investigative thriller set amid the aftermath of disaster.<\/p>\n Yokoyama\u2019s tale is slow to unfold, and it\u2019s less fraught with peril than the usual mystery, but as a roman \u00e0 clef it speaks to his hope, as he writes in the preface, that “the reader will witness both the positive and negative essence of human nature.\u201d ~Kirkus<\/p>\n Impressively, Yokoyama makes accessible drama out of Yuuki\u2019s battles with his colleagues and superiors, and the introduction of an opportunity for personal redemption provides some glimmers of hope in an otherwise depressing tale. Readers will be deeply moved. ~Publishers Weekly<\/p>\n In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flower beds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalizes paranoia and suspicion. Some try to flee\u2014whether to a mysterious gambling bordello or to ancestral homes that can be reached only underground through muddy caves, sewers, and tunnels. Others seek out the refuge of Nest County, where traditional Chinese herbal medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self. Each life is circumscribed by buried secrets and transcendent delusions.<\/p>\n Can Xue\u2019s masterful love stories for the new millennium trace love\u2019s many guises\u2014satirical, tragic, transient, lasting, nebulous, and fulfilling\u2014against a kaleidoscopic backdrop of commerce and industry, fraud and exploitation, and sex and romance drawn from the East and the West.<\/p>\n Part of the difficulty of reading Love in the New Millennium\u00a0<\/em>was that I couldn\u2019t stop tweeting passages. To be a reader was to become a trailer, and to become an actor, too. It\u2019s irresistible, the way one enters this laughable, shifting no-time where everyone inside is talking about like the weather. It\u2019s also very boring, as a plotless book is. A circling, nonbuilding narrative gets tiring. What\u2019s the pleasure, then? Humor<\/em> and surprise. <\/em>It\u2019s a frankly poetic existence. Plus my reader\u2019s sense of awe grew continually at the endless refillability of the thing. The book is a vase, it\u2019s a form. ~Eileen Myles,\u00a0The Paris Review Blog<\/em><\/p>\n The country landscape in Frontier<\/i> is pure Xue: part fairy tale and part mystery with little resolution. This is also true of Love<\/i>, especially when we follow Xiao Yuan to Nest County which feels a lot like Pebble Town. Add to this the fast absurdist dialogue from Xue\u2019s Yellow Mud Street<\/i> and we might assemble something like Love in the New Millennium<\/i>. ~Kelly Krumrie,\u00a0Full Stop<\/em><\/p>\n Kimi\u00e2 Sadr fled Iran at the age of ten in the company of her mother and sisters to join her father in France. Now twenty-five and facing the future she has built for herself as well as the prospect of a new generation, Kimi\u00e2 is inundated by her own memories and the stories of her ancestors, which come to her in unstoppable, uncontainable waves. In the waiting room of a Parisian fertility clinic, generations of flamboyant Sadrs return to her, including her formidable great-grandfather Montazemolmolk, with his harem of fifty-two wives, and her parents, Darius and Sara, stalwart opponents of each regime that befalls them.<\/p>\n In this high-spirited, kaleidoscopic story, key moments of Iranian history, politics, and culture punctuate stories of family drama and triumph. Yet it is Kimi\u00e2 herself\u2013\u2013punk-rock aficionado, storyteller extraordinaire, a Scheherazade of our time, and above all a modern woman divided between family traditions and her own \u201cdisorientalization\u201d\u2013\u2013who forms the heart of this bestselling and beloved novel.<\/p>\n Disoriental<\/em>, a stylistically fragmented novel by the French-Iranian N\u00e9gar Djavadi, reads like a multilayered pastiche of unrelated themes, yet all connected to Kimi\u00e2 Sadr\u2019s troubled life. ~Azarin Sadegh,\u00a0The Los\u00a0Angeles Review of Books<\/i><\/p>\n The title of the book, Disoriental<\/em>, beautifully encompasses not just the experience of the narrator throughout her life across geographies, eras, and identities but also what Djavadi seems to have envisioned for her readers\u2019 experience of the book. The captivating story of a girl who grows into a woman dealing with the burdens of history on her country, her family, and herself, Disoriental<\/em> offers so much to both non-Iranian and Iranian readers. ~Poupeh Missaghi, World Literature Today<\/em><\/p>\n From one of the most exciting voices in modern Russian literature, Alisa Ganieva, comes Bride and Groom<\/i>, the tumultuous love story of two young city-dwellers who meet when they return home to their families in rural Dagestan. When traditional family expectations and increasing religious and cultural tension threaten to shatter their bond, Marat and Patya struggle to overcome obstacles determined to keep them apart, while fate seems destined to keep them together\u2014until the very end.<\/p>\n Bride and Groom<\/i> is a nice little novel of contemporary Dagestan life, Ganieva’s light touch allowing for a low-key but still very revealing socio-cultural profile. A consistently humorous touch, and the weaving in of Sufi-tradition — explained more fully by Ganieva in her Afterword — make for a sprightly novel — though perhaps also skimming too lightly across the surface (even as it suggests a much darker, deeper expanse beneath). ~M.A. Orthofer,\u00a0The Complete Review<\/em><\/p>\n One has the sense that the spirit of Jane Austen lives on in Alisa Ganieva\u2019s Bride and Groom<\/em>. A runner-up for the Russian Booker Prize and her second novel to appear in Carol Apollonio\u2019s English translation, it has the kind of tenderness, tradition, and subtlety that Austen surely would have recognized. ~Hannah Weber, Asymptote<\/em><\/p>\n Over the course of four dazzling novels translated into dozens of languages, Sj\u00f3n has earned a global reputation as one of the world\u2019s most interesting writers. But what the world has never been able to read is his great trilogy of novels, known collectively as CoDex 1962<\/i>?now finally complete.<\/p>\n Josef L\u00f6we, the narrator, was born in 1962?the same year, the same moment even, as Sj\u00f3n. Josef\u2019s story, however, stretches back decades in the form of Leo L\u00f6we?a Jewish fugitive during World War II who has an affair with a maid in a German inn; together, they form a baby from a piece of clay. If the first volume is a love story, the second is a crime story: L\u00f6we arrives in Iceland with the clay-baby inside a hatbox, only to be embroiled in a murder mystery?but by the end of the volume, his clay son has come to life. And in the final volume, set in present-day Reykjav\u00edk, Josef\u2019s story becomes science fiction as he crosses paths with the outlandish CEO of a biotech company (based closely on reality) who brings the story of genetics and genesis full circle. But the future, according to Sj\u00f3n, is not so dark as it seems.<\/p>\n In CoDex 1962<\/i>, Sj\u00f3n has woven ancient and modern material and folklore and cosmic myths into a singular masterpiece?encompassing genre fiction, theology, expressionist film, comic strips, fortean studies, genetics, and, of course, the rich tradition of Icelandic storytelling.<\/p>\n Sj\u00f3n is celebrating story while commemorating the brief lives of many of those born in the same year as him, 1962, yet fated to early deaths through disease, chance accidents and other horrors. In a sombre recurring device, he includes random lists of the dead, reminders of life\u2019s fragility inserted into a lively picaresque about a difficult birth that makes that of Frankenstein\u2019s monster appear straightforward. This wayward, exciting odyssey confronts death throughout. Nothing is quite what it seems, and there are no easy answers. Here, instead, is an artist preoccupied with questions. ~Eileen Battersby,\u00a0The Guardian<\/em><\/p>\n Sometimes sentences balloon to nearly Krasznahorkai scope and complexity; in other places, traditional dialogue and pacing situate scenes squarely in more familiar twentieth-century literary territory. References permeate throughout, making this work less distinctly a novel at times and more a metacommentary\u2014a sort of thinking script, which benefits the more cultural ballast one can bring to it. Pushkin and Kafka seem as present at times as the book\u2019s ostensibly main cast: Leo, Marie-Sophie, Karl, the Archangel Gabriel, and all the rest. ~Andrew Singer,\u00a0World Literature Today<\/em><\/p>\n Bricks and Mortar<\/i>\u00a0is the story of the sex trade in a big city in the former GDR, from just before 1989 to the present day, charting the development of the industry from absolute prohibition to full legality in the twenty years following the reunification of Germany. The focus is on the rise and fall of one man from football hooligan to large-scale landlord and service- provider for prostitutes to, ultimately, a man persecuted by those he once trusted. But we also hear other voices: many different women who work in prostitution, their clients, small-time gangsters, an ex-jockey searching for his drug-addict daughter, a businessman from the West, a girl forced into child prostitution, a detective, a pirate radio presenter\u2026<\/p>\n In his most ambitious book to date, Clemens Meyer pays homage to modernist, East German and contemporary writers like Alfred D\u00f6blin, Wolfgang Hilbig and David Peace but uses his own style and almost hallucinatory techniques. Time shifts and stretches, people die and come to life again, and Meyer takes his characters seriously and challenges his readers in this dizzying eye-opening novel that also finds inspiration in the films of Russ Meyer, Takashi Miike, Gaspar No\u00e9 and David Lynch.<\/p>\n While all the \u201ctricks of the trade\u201d prostitutes advertise (another of AK\u2019s services) are described, there is no pornography here. With the conceit of prostitution as the quintessential expression of capitalism, though, Meyer savages all forms of exploitation with darkly perverse humor. As befits the span of subjects and voices, the language ranges from the arcana of high finance and law to the street argot of the underworld. This language plus all of Meyer\u2019s wordplay make Katy Derbyshire\u2019s translation of this shadowland symphony a positively gargantuan achievement. ~Ulf Zimmermann,\u00a0World Literature Today<\/em><\/p>\n The language is dizzying at times, frank and colloquial in others, but through Katy Derbyshire<\/a>\u2018s glorious and award-winning translation, the reader is guided around this intoxicating, unflinching underworld without getting lost. Some of the content in Bricks and Mortar will be shocking to many, but this sombre drift through lonely nights and clandestine activities offers a fascinating and compelling take on post-Cold War Germany. ~Reece Choules,\u00a0Culture Trip<\/em><\/p>\n In the outskirts of Buenos Aires in 1907, a doctor becomes involved in a misguided experiment that investigates the threshold between life and death. One hundred years later, a celebrated artist goes to extremes in search of aesthetic transformation, turning himself into an art object. How far are we willing to go, Larraquy asks, in pursuit of transcendence? The world of Comemadre<\/i> is full of vulgarity, excess, and discomfort: strange ants that form almost perfect circles, missing body parts, obsessive love affairs, and man-eating plants. Darkly funny, smart, and engrossing, here the monstrous is not alien, but the consquence of our relentless pursuit of collective and personal progress.<\/p>\n Part of the horrifying joy of this novel is how safely you can rest in the hands of a maniac as the narrative world is built and burned down around you. In a scene in the first story, we encounter Quintana persuading a patient to consent to the life-ending experiment. The man is of Italian descent and Quintana explains that Mother Nature is wise and it had endowed southern Italians with high levels of potassium. Unfortunately, he says, the potassium affects the chemical structure of the serum (a placebo) they had used to try to fight the patient\u2019s cancer. Quintana is clear and confident, and the patient agrees to the experiment. \u201cThe patient doesn\u2019t understand,\u201d Quintana says, \u201cbut it\u2019s enough for him that I do.\u201d No reader would be able to know where this story is going. But it\u2019s enough that Larraquy does. ~Nathan Scott McNamara,\u00a0The Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em><\/p>\n With clear prose, dark humor, and a sense of humanity tucked behind all the morbidity, Comemadre<\/em> is an uneven novella with one classic scene and a grim reminder of the disintegration of the body and the even quicker decay of the morality of powerful men. ~J. David Osborne,\u00a0World Literature Today<\/em><\/p>\n An\u00a0homage to American science-fiction films and novels, The Bottom of the Sky<\/em> is the story of two boys, a disturbingly beautiful girl, and their joint love for other planets. Their friendship is formed during the heyday of sci-fi writing, a time defined by almost cult-like literary groups and pulp covers awash in gaudy alien landscapes. But time has passed, and the three members of The Faraways have drifted apart. The future they once dreamed of is now happening, but interstellar travel to Urkh 24 has been replaced with 9\/11, the Gulf War, and a mysterious \u201cincident\u201d at the center of it all.<\/p>\n A Kurt Vonnegut novel told by David Lynch, filtered through the madness of Philip K. Dick, The Bottom of the Sky<\/em> is a triumph of style, or, as Fres\u00e1n says in the afterword, \u201ca clump of simultaneously broadcast messages, like a storyline that only wants to be a succession of marvelous moments seen all at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n At key moments, Fres\u00e1n\u2019s prose turns incantatory and deliberately repetitive; in one chapter, he begins seven consecutive paragraphs with \u201cThey say.\u201d Though this can be effective, it\u2019s a technique that he employs a little too often, perhaps. But this book\u2019s flaws are minor when compared to its narrative vitality. Some horrors are almost impossible to confront head-on, and it can take the proper medium\u2014in this case, an engrossing paean to science fiction\u2014to help us understand them. ~Kevin Canfield,\u00a0World Literature Today<\/em><\/p>\n Fres\u00e1n\u2019s paragraphs can be mere single lines, his lines phrasal, his phrases elliptical, his ellipses infuriating and provocative, but in the end his prose bristles with energy. He never lets the reader feel totally comfortable or linger in the groove. He withholds resolution until the reader just about wants to give up \u2014 but then he delivers. The Bottom of the Sky<\/em> is another mutant novel about the most basic of human experiences. All of them. ~Joey Rubin,\u00a0The Los\u00a0Angeles Review of Books<\/i><\/p>\n Before he enlisted as a soldier in the Iran\u2013Iraq war and disappeared, Amir Yamini was a carefree playboy whose only concerns were seducing women and riling his religious family. Five years later, his mother and sister Reyhaneh find him in a mental hospital for shell-shocked soldiers, his left arm and most of his memory lost. Amir is haunted by the vision of a mysterious woman whose face he cannot see\u2014the crescent moon on her forehead shines too brightly. He names her Moon Brow.<\/p>\n Back home in Tehran, the prodigal son is both hailed as a living martyr to the cause of Ayatollah Khomeini\u2019s Revolution and confined as a dangerous madman. His sense of humor, if not his sanity, intact, Amir cajoles Reyhaneh into helping him escape the garden walls to search for Moon Brow. Piecing together the puzzle of his past, Amir decides there\u2019s only one solution: he must return to the battlefield and find the remains of his severed arm\u2014and discover its secret.<\/p>\n All the while, to angels sit on our hero\u2019s shoulders and inscribe the story in enthrallingly distinctive prose. Wildly inventive and radically empathetic, steeped in Persian folklore and contemporary Middle East history, Moon Brow<\/i> is the great Iranian novelist Shahriar Mandanipour\u2019s unforgettable epic of love, war, morality, faith, and family.<\/p>\n Moon Brow\u00a0<\/em>eschews propriety for disturbing realities. The\u00a0Dav?lp?\u2019s suffocating grip appears to extend to the rampant misogyny that Amir, his friends, and his fellow soldiers entertain. War especially offers a hyper-masculine landscape on which every enemy\u2019s mother and sister is a hypothetical object vulnerable to violent sexual desires. Judgment is administered through the use of the angel of sin and the angel of virtue, who sit on Amir\u2019s shoulders and act as scribes. The angels take turns recounting events depending on the matter at hand and often dispute what should be written and by whom. \u00a0~Damara Atrigol Pratt,\u00a0Words Without Borders<\/em><\/p>\n Like his previous novel, Mandanipour is concerned with the idea that readers glimpse both the specifics of Iran and Iranian history (his novel is replete with references to the events of Iran\u2019s revolution and aftermath) but, more importantly, engage with the ideas of freedom and restriction and of the power of love to transport us beyond social, spiritual, and political confinement. He draws our attention to both the possibilities for freedom and redemption as well as the soul-crushing realities of war and power to imprison the human soul and psyche. Mandanipour\u2019s ambitious and highly complex novel demands from his readers an attention to the much bigger questions of human life\u2014both the idiosyncratic and the predictable as well as the comic and tragic. His highly inventive and playful writing as well as Moon Brow\u2019<\/em>s structure cast the reader into a psychological minefield that captivates and leaves us in awe of the writer\u2019s ability to move from the historical and political reality of his own society to the poetic and elusive power of universal human love. ~Persis Kerim,\u00a0World Literature Today<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cWhen I walked through the large iron gate of the hospital, I must have still been alive\u2026\u201d So begins Ahmed Bouanani\u2019s arresting, hallucinatory 1989 novel The Hospital<\/em>, appearing for the first time in English translation. Based on Bouanani\u2019s own experiences as a tuberculosis patient, the hospital begins to feel increasingly like a prison or a strange nightmare: the living resemble the dead; bureaucratic angels of death descend to direct traffic, claiming the lives of a motley cast of inmates one by one; childhood memories and fantasies of resurrection flash in and out of the narrator\u2019s consciousness as the hospital transforms before his eyes into an eerie, metaphorical space. Somewhere along the way, the hospital\u2019s iron gate disappears.<\/p>\n Like Sadegh Hedayat\u2019s The Blind Owl<\/em>, the works of Franz Kafka?or perhaps like Mann\u2019s The Magic Mountain<\/em> thrown into a meat-grinder?The Hospital<\/em> is a nosedive into the realms of the imagination, in which a journey to nowhere in particular leads to the most shocking places.<\/p>\n Bouanani, who died in 2011, was a prolific artist whose work was constantly censored, stifled, sidelined, ignored, or damaged, by men and sometimes by natural catastrophe. In his lifetime he published only The Hospital<\/i> and three slim poetry collections, and made one feature-length film\u2014and even that was almost entirely lost. His work, which was always deeply concerned with the question of memory, both personal and national, has been rescued from near oblivion in recent years by the efforts of a small circle of admirers and the dedication of a surviving daughter. Now The Hospital<\/i> and a collection of his poems (combining two original volumes), The Shutters<\/i>, have been translated from the French, and are available in English for the first time. ~Ursula Lindsey,\u00a0The New York Review of Books<\/em><\/p>\n The narrator uses the dreamlike aura of the hospital in a self-conscious way as he wonders for \u201cthe thousandth time\u201d what he\u2019s doing there and questions whether his experience is \u201cdream or reality\u201d\u2014and he then aptly alludes to his earlier reading of Kafka and Borges. Nothing ever becomes quite clear in the narrator\u2019s experience but rather remains murkily allegorical. Whatever else it may be, the hospital is definitely a microcosm of suffering humanity: \u201cRegardless of where I look, even in the depths of my sleep, I see nothing but men set upon by a decay greater than ever before. It\u2019s not just disease wearing them down.\u201d\u00a0A puzzling but haunting novel. ~Kirkus<\/p>\n In a crumbling apartment block in the Angolan city of Luanda, families work, laugh, scheme, and get by. In the middle of it all is the melancholic Odonato, nostalgic for the country of his youth and searching for his lost son. As his hope drains away and as the city outside his doors changes beyond all recognition, Odonato\u2019s flesh becomes transparent and his body increasingly weightless. A captivating blend of magical realism, scathing political satire, tender comedy, and literary experimentation, Transparent City<\/em> offers a gripping and joyful portrait of urban Africa quite unlike any before yet published in English, and places Ondjaki, indisputably, among the continent\u2019s most accomplished writers.<\/p>\n Despite Transparent City\u2019<\/em>s focus on a community slipping down a precipice and toward urban demise, Ondjaki\u2019s prose pulses with life. In the hours before a cataclysmic fire and a historic eclipse, a politically estranged father scours the underbelly of Luanda, Angola, for his mortally wounded son. However, to cite this endeavor as the novel\u2019s primary thread could prove problematic as Ondjaki bounds between perspectives with the fluidity of consciousness. ~Daniel Bokemper,\u00a0World Literature Today<\/em><\/p>\n These disparate stories are woven into a beautiful narrative that touches on government corruption, the privatization of water, the dangers of extracting oil for wealth, and the bastardization of religion for profit. The novel reads like a love song to a tortured, desperately messed-up city that is undergoing remarkable transformations. ~Publishers Weekly<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Slave-Old-Man.jpg?resize=315%2C450\")
Slave Old Man<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nby Patrick Chamoiseau<\/span>
\ntranslated from the French and Creole by Linda Coverdale
\n(Martinique\/New Press)<\/span>
\nPurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/Fox.jpg?resize=291%2C450\")
Fox<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nby Dubravka Ugresic<\/span>
\ntranslated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac and David Williams
\n(Croatia\/Open Letter)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/The-Governesses.jpg?resize=280%2C450\")
The Governesses<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nby Anne Serre<\/span>
\ntranslated from the French by Mark Hutchinson
\n(France\/New Directions)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Dezafi.jpg?resize=291%2C450\")
D\u00e9zafi<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nby Frank\u00e9tienne<\/span>
\ntranslated from the French by Asselin Charles
\n(Haiti\/University of Virginia Press)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/After-the-Winter.jpg?resize=300%2C450\")
After the Winter<\/span><\/strong><\/em>
\nby Guadalupe Nettel<\/span>
\ntranslated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey
\n(Mexico\/Coffee House)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\nIn parallel and entwining stories that move from Havana to Paris to New York City, no routine, no argument for the pleasures of solitude, can withstand our most human drive to find ourselves in another, and fall in love. And no depth of emotion can protect us from love’s inevitable loss.<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Lion-Cross-Point.jpg?resize=331%2C530\")
Lion Cross Point<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nby Masatsugu Ono<\/span>
\ntranslated from the Japanese by Angus Turvill
\n(Japan\/Two Lines Press)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Convenience-Store-Woman.jpg?resize=332%2C450\")
Convenience Store Woman<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nby Sayaka Murata<\/span>
\ntranslated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori
\n(Japan\/Grove)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Seventeen.jpg?resize=293%2C450\")
Seventeen<\/span><\/strong><\/em>
\nby Hideo Yokoyama<\/span>
\ntranslated from the Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai
\n(Japan\/FSG)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Love-in-the-New-Millenium.jpg?resize=296%2C450\")
Love in the New Millennium<\/span><\/em><\/strong>
\nby Can Xue<\/span>
\ntranslated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen
\n(China\/Yale University Press)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Disoriental.jpg?resize=289%2C450\")
Disoriental<\/span><\/strong><\/em>
\nby N\u00e9gar Djavadi<\/span>
\ntranslated from the French by Tina Kover
\n(Iran\/Europa Editions)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Bride-and-Groom.jpg?resize=287%2C450\")
Bride and Groom<\/span><\/strong><\/em>
\nby Alisa Ganieva<\/span>
\ntranslated from the Russian by Carol Apollonio
\n(Russia\/Deep Vellum)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Codex-1962.jpg?resize=293%2C450\")
CoDex 1962<\/span><\/strong><\/em>
\nby Sj\u00f3n<\/span>
\ntranslated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb
\n(Iceland\/FSG)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Bricks-and-Mortar.jpg?resize=295%2C450\")
Bricks and Mortar<\/span><\/strong><\/em>
\nby Clemens Meyer<\/span>
\ntranslated from the German by Katy Derbyshire
\n(Germany\/Fitzcarraldo Editions)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Comemadre.jpg?resize=290%2C450\")
Comemadre<\/span><\/strong><\/em>
\nby Roque Larraquy<\/span>
\ntranslated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary
\n(Argentina\/Coffee House)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Bottom-of-the-Sky.jpg?resize=291%2C450\")
Bottom of the Sky<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nby Rodrigo Fres\u00e1n<\/span>
\ntranslated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden
\n(Argentina\/Open Letter)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Moon-Brow.jpg?resize=300%2C450\")
Moon Brow<\/span><\/strong><\/em>
\nby Shahriar Mandanipour<\/span>
\ntranslated from the Persian by Khalili Sara
\n(Iran\/Restless Books)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"Ahmed](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/The-Hospital.jpg?resize=292%2C450\")
The Hospital<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nby Ahmed Bouanani<\/span>
\ntranslated from the French by Lara Vergnaud
\n(Morocco\/New Directions)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Transparent-City.jpg?resize=290%2C450\"){kind=spacer}
Transparent City<\/span><\/strong><\/em>
\nby Ondjaki<\/span>
\ntranslated from the Portuguese by Stephen Henighan
\n(Angola\/Biblioasis)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Pretty-Things.jpg?resize=310%2C450\")
Pretty Things<\/strong><\/em><\/span>
\nby Virginie Despentes<\/span>
\ntranslated from the French by Emma Ramadan
\n(France\/Feminist Press)<\/span>
\npurchase from Amazon<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n