People From My Neighborhood – Hiromi Kawakami
Kawakami draws indiscriminately on the resources of various sub-genres of speculative literature, connecting her stories here and there for unity’s sake, but never straining for consistency as a straight-up fantasy writer might in conjuring a magic “system.”
This experiential reading of the book is, in parts, created by what the blurb notes as Thúy’s “trademark style” which is “close to prose poetry.” And, like poetry, the book is economical and careful with words. Every sentence is a sensory jolt to the reader — heavy with meaning that must be unpacked and savored.
Men in My Situation – Per Petterson
The writer returns to the trauma every decade or so to see if this time his stunt man can catapult himself into the twenty-first century.
The Communicating Vessels – Friederike Mayröcker
Ultimately, more than positively being about something, the book hints at eliminating such a possibility altogether.
Another departure in Heaven is the refusal to acknowledge death as the final act of human life.
Nandana’s translation of Acrobat, then, is a material necessity that achieves her mother’s standards in a compelling and artful way.
When We Cease to Understand the World – Benjamín Labatut
Labatut’s novel is a stunning book about epistemic breaks – about sudden ideas that shatter across an age.
What Atay stood for in Turkey, which once dreamed that it was a distant European nation, is gone and done for, and he is now lonelier than even when he was alive.
When I Sing, Mountains Dance – Irene Solà
When I Sing, Mountains Dance is a novel brimming with hope for future generations, and for the vitality of the Pyrenees mountains.
Warning to the Crocodiles – António Lobo Antunes
With his use of pitch black humor and his precise attention to humanity (and the ways humans can be humiliated) against a broader historical backdrop — this supposedly impossible fusion of aestheticism and social reference — Lobo Atunes’s fictive worlds seem inexhaustible.