The Hare by Melanie Finn
Finn gives us an important, comprehensive picture of the stages of a woman’s learning, suggesting that, over time, teachers will be rejected, new ones sought, and the student might herself become a teacher.
The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata by Gina Apostol
Gina Apostol’s novel, which demands the reader’s active participation, is filled with both humorous and serious moments, references to itself, as well as political and literary history.
The Reimagined Tales of Where the Wild Ladies Are
The stories in Matsuda Aoko’s 2016 collection encourage us to change how we understand stories—whether that be the folktales we tell children or the larger national myths we hold on to as adults—and to see where we can break away from received narratives into new futures.
The Age of Skin by Dubravka Ugrešić
Dubravka Ugrešić a formidable and unique cultural critic. She demands that we see deeper, even where we refuse to look.
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Lost Edens
Erpenbeck’s 2008 novel, centered on the history of a small parcel of land on the edge of the German lake known as the Märkisches Meer, is a sophisticated retelling of the Creation and Fall stories from the biblical book of Genesis.
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino by Julián Herbert
Herbert’s new collection is an ambitious, generous boon . . . his parody of Tarantino’s style and MacSweeney’s lively translation chart unmarked territory.
Invisible Ink by Patrick Modiano
What makes Modiano’s new novel such an enchanting read is its insistence on the importance of “those spaces where memory blurs into forgetting,” and its glyptic insights into the mechanisms by which forgetting offers up alternative chronologies . . .
Max Blecher’s Landscapes of Illness
Illness is not Blecher’s subject as much as it is the occasion that forces his protagonists into a world of previously unavailable experience—a world that makes it impossible for those who fall ill to ever be “cured” of the way of being, seeing, and thinking into which they have
A Lover’s Discourse by Xiaolu Guo
Xiaolu Guo’s new novel is a restless and mesmerizing portrait of the immigrant experience.
What Does Being a Japanese Writer Mean in a Globalizing World?
Mizumura Minae’s career has been focused on exploring this question in formally inventive ways that often incorporate her own cross-cultural autobiography. In the process, she has managed to transcend the specifics of her own personal story, creating a body of work with incisive things to say about the individual’s