The Case of Cem – Vera Mutafchieva
The Case of Cem takes place in the fifteenth century, when the world was crudely split between East and West—not unlike the Cold War world in which the novel was written.
Your Name, Palestine – Olivia Elias
As a child of the Nakba, Elias has dedicated her oeuvre to the Palestinian cause and to the memory of the repeated cycles of Palestinian displacement and oppression.
Recital of the Dark Verses – Luis Felipe Fabre
Fabre blends serious (but not self-serious) social and religious commentary with punny nameplay humor and mutilated bodies to make a point about how fundamentalism itself arises from relatively picayune squabblings.
What Lindo offers is not necessarily “forgiveness”—for her father, or for anyone else—but rather the privilege of being faithfully and thoroughly observed.
For Ravn, the pregnant body becomes a microcosmic environment tensely defending itself against the violent onslaught of the global conditions of capitalism.
Deceit, Gallardo implies here in her stunningly economical prose, does not originate in the individual act of hiding a pregnancy, but in the collective act of condemning a woman to gestate one in secret dread.
Sánchez didn’t believe in depression at first—or any mental health condition for that matter. . . . Like me, she’d learned that people just needed “to snap out of it or to pull themselves together.” If only it were that simple.
So Many People, Mariana – Maria Judite de Carvalho
Practiced in Portugal for centuries, censorship had been ingrained in literary culture by the time Maria Judite de Carvalho, one of the country’s most important twentieth-century authors, began writing.
A Line in the World – Dorthe Nors
Whether visiting a lighthouse with the author, or a seaside museum, one always senses the nearness, vigor, and life-endangering threat of the churning waters.
Each character’s Roman sea is quite different, but the similarity remains: Each has been tossed up on its shore.