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Rio Shimamoto’s First Love , an overdue English-language debut by an important Japanese author translated by Louise Heal Kawai, is a portrait of patriarchy as a series of glassy, threatening surfaces. It turns a procedural setup—Yuki, a psychologist, investigates the case of a woman who stabbed her father to death, seemingly without motive—into a m... See more

I picked up Edwin Frank’s Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel thinking I might read a few chapters. But this is literary criticism that is itself literary—alive and strange and hard to put down. Frank’s selection is eclectic—of the thirty-two novels he covers, some are expected (James Joyce’s Ulysses ), some unexpected (H. G... See more

Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel , translated by Susan Bernofsky, set in post-lockdown Berlin, is an absurd, dark, dreamlike narrative that meditates on warfare, religion, memory, migration, and belonging through the strange consciousness of a literary researcher, Patrik. A Celan scholar who self-identifies as “the patient,” Pat... See more

I’m gonna give my favorite-novel-of-the-year award to Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California , about a woman who assumes her brother’s identity shortly after his death. It’s fun, beautiful, slim, weird. And it’s about grief. Blackburn’s approach to space-time in her short fiction is awesome; her novel has vivid characterizations—of both ... See more