The Woman Dies circumvented my critical brain: it made me laugh, shocked me, revealed my tastes to be safe rather than incisive.
In the Realm of Motes – Baptiste Gaillard
Human witnesses are nowhere in this book
Apotheosis of Music – Witold Wirpsza
For Wirpsza, a fugue can be a person, notes can be nails that stick in one’s head, and God himself can play the piano of humankind
In a Deep Blue Hour — Peter Stamm
“In a Deep Blue Hour, the latest novel by Swiss writer Peter Stamm, unfolds in . . . [the] interstice between documentary and narrative film, reality and fiction, memory and dream.”
Sakina’s Kiss – Vivek Shanbhag
SAKINA’S KISS is an attempt to travel between two […] islands, the village Gothic and the urban global
Motherhood and its Ghosts — Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger
Forced into memory after becoming a mother herself, Mersal seeks to arrive at an understanding of who her mother was in order to understand who she will become.
Heart Lamp — Banu Mushtaq, Translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi
One of the most inventive and profound aspects of Heart Lamp is how Mushtaq layers these multiple points of view: in “Black Cobras” alone there are at least six, most of them the perspectives of women and girls. A few stories are told in the first person, but most of the time the close third-person narrator moves between those who have all the power and those who have none.
Places in the Dark – Lidmila Kábrtová
Why bother being good when paradise was never promised?
Wickerwork – Christian Lehnert
Nature crafts its own metaphors
The novel is a portrait of growing up and growing old, twin phenomena that run in the same direction yet seem somehow opposed