Concerning My Daughter – Kim Hye-jin
Tightly structured, carefully crafted . . . no word, symbol, metaphor, or nuance is wasted.
The Flowers of Buffoonery – Osamu Dazai
This creator of moody, Dostoevskian heroes—toeing the line between brutality and beauty, cynicism and élan—has the kind of biography that threatens to overshadow the work itself, and that’s before you realize that most of what Dazai wrote is taken to be autobiographical.
A Private Affair – Beppe Fenoglio
In Fenoglio’s narrative of war, everyone is equally dehumanized and every story equally absurd.
The book asks the reader to reflect on the cost of indifference to the world, particularly as the state translates human life into the abstractions necessary for bureaucratic processing.
For all its humor and moments of warmth, The Hive is a portrait of misery.
Rather than gods atop Mount Olympus, the engine of dramatic irony may well be the voice of bitter experience.
In its complex imbrication of queerness and heteropatriarchy, indigenous critique and colonial discourse, Pina stages the bizarre and beautiful workings of desire.
The centering of urine rejects poetry’s traditional subjects in favor of a more egalitarian common denominator.
Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf – Malika Moustadraf
Translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie, Blood Feast is a collection of fourteen stories that hiss and spit back at forms of unjust authority.
Little Foxes Took Up Matches – Katya Kazbek
Kazbek weaves the fairy tale’s threads into a larger queer narrative to complicate questions of gender and sexuality.