to read

Into this fog slipped Halle Butler’s Banal Nightmare . The novel, Butler’s third, is the story of Moddie, an overeducated and underachieving thirtysomething who, following a seismic breakup, abandons Chicago for her Midwestern hometown, where she tries to get a grip on her life. It’s a sharp book, with painfully real characters and perfectly pitche... See more

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

Mariana Enríquez’s new story collection, A Sunny Place for Shady People , seethes and roils with a body horror that evokes the films of Richard Kern and David Cronenberg. Her monsters are real: misogynists, corrupt dictators. There is a surreal and visceral magic to these stories of cruelty, sexual violence, and poverty, brilliantly captured in Meg... See more

Damir Karakaš’s Celebration , translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, begins at the end of World War II. Its four sections—“House,” “Dogs,” “Celebration,” and “Father”—move from 1945 to 1935, then 1941 to 1928, and follow Mijo, a man whose yellow-brown uniform marks him as a member of the recently fallen Croatian fascist organization of the Ustaše. Exile... 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 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

Saskia Vogel’s translation of Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan: A Novel in Verse does what you want a translation to do: take you inside a world and an experience that you couldn’t otherwise access, and make you ache for it. This epic follows three generations of Sami people in Norway as they try to preserve their way of life in the face of shifting borders... See more