Natsumi knows she’s bored, but she keeps trying to convince herself that boredom is comfort, safety, and happiness. In actuality, boredom is the closest thing to Natsumi’s identity; it’s what she’s “about.”
A sharp, tunnel visioned interrogation of what happened and happens to Harchi, her family, her neighbors. The “we” she uses in the title and in the text could be a “we” of her family unit, but also of second-generation North African immigrants, all suffering racism in France.
The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu – Augusto Higa Oshiro
With his passivity resulting from the weighty history of deprivation and discrimination, what are the conditions for the possibility of Nakamatsu’s enlightenment?
The Narrow Cage – Vasily Eroshenko
All of these characters, whether human or otherwise, are connected in their subjection to both nature’s and humanity’s whims.
Chung paints each story with similarly hair-raising color palettes, but smartly refuses to limit herself to one structure, subject, or genre.
Who Killed My Father — Édouard Louis
Édouard Louis’s father is not dead, but the political ruling class in France have, in one way or another, killed him. And Louis intends to name names.
Even in an age of exhausted postmodernity, in which there’s supposedly nothing new under the sun, the imagination may give rise to something unforeseen, unprecedented: We’ll know it by our laughter.
Starboard of My Wife – Yotsumoto Yasuhiro
The stuff of life, no matter how quotidian—indeed, precisely because it is quotidian—becomes the raw material for invention, like a long marriage.
By the Rivers of Babylon – António Lobo Antunes
A leisurely drift through the circadian rhythms of night and day, while past and present elements mingle in a hospital room, as a projection of the protagonist’s consciousness.
Rereading Silence: From the Diaries of Those Years – Yevsey Tseytlin
Rereading Silence is a diary and a confession, a portrait of an incredibly cruel epoch and of the narrator’s soul.