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.
Vormorgen: The Collected Poems – Ernst Toller
Mathilda Cullen’s translation of Ernst Toller’s poetry is a labor of love, recovering the all-but-forgotten literary legacy of an enigmatic figure
DEATH FUGUE is an allegorical tale as chilling in parts as anything by Atwood or Zamyatin, yet told with airy, fitful surrealism. It is both reposeful and purposeful, an unerringly calm vision of beauty and terror.
Seasons of Purgatory – Shahriar Mandanipour
Mandanipour, in Khalili’s translation, cultivates an unsettling sort of ambiguity, an open-endedness that makes these stories rich with enigma, asking to be read, then read again.
Stranger to the Moon – Evelio Rosero
Rosero goads the reader to consider what tenses we’re thinking, dreaming, imagining in, as we hurtle at the precipice, towards a future not by any means assured.
ROGOMELEC is a collection of surrealist vignettes, conjoined by non-sequiturs. The novel is opaque, and that’s how Fini likes it.
This novel is a miraculous feat: a novel that denounces injustice, advocates for the elderly and the ill, and clearly advocates for access to abortion, without giving up style or literary verve.