[Quintana] strips away the illusions that parents hold that they can just “cloak” their language or argue behind closed doors. Children see through it. They always have.
Tales of Tangier: The Complete Short Stories of Mohamed Choukri
Even in the stories that project a more lighthearted air . . . there is a looming sense that something is horribly wrong, that the party is over.
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.