*STARRED REVIEW Mira Sethi showcases her literary lineage as the daughter of internationally renowned, award-winning journalists Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin, and the younger sister of lauded author and musician Ali Sethi. Already an established actor and journalist, Sethi makes her fiction debut with six partially...
Short stories can be the perfect antidote to these days of winter blues, pandemic panic, and cabin fever. Deesha Philyaw’s debut short-story collection – The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, a much-lauded, National-Book-Award-finalist – illuminates the lives of nine Black woman with a performance from Janina...
The Night Marchers and Other Oceanian Tales is the fourth installment in Iron Circus Comics' geographically specific Cautionary Fables & Fairytales series: African tales in The Girl Who Married a Skull, Asian stories in Tamamo the Fox Maiden, and European fare in The Nixie of the Mill-Pond. Volume four...
*STARRED REVIEW Debut author Deesha Philyaw’s 2020 National Book Award finalist in fiction gets an almost (we can just ignore those minor, clumsy production glitches) flawless performance from prolific, expert Janina Edwards. Throughout the nine consistently superb stories, Edwards adapts effortlessly between mothers and daughters, friends...
Best known for the 1991 Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road, Nigerian author Ben Okri has maintained a prolific output of lauded fiction, poetry, and essays. His provocative collection, Prayer for the Living, presents 24 stories and a single poem that include previously published pieces from...
Teens and young adult women populate the majority of Girls of a Certain Age, an intriguing first collection by Maria Adelmann. At least eight of these 13 stories were previously published as early as 2014, many in prestigious literary journals. As with many debuts, Girls proves...
Nicole Krauss hasn’t audiobooked since joining an all-star cast for the aural adaptation of Etgar Keret’s collection, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (2012). She is clearly an ideal choice for narrating her own writing in this, her full aural debut, with her collection examining and...
Proceed with Caution is the title of this collection as well as one of the stories in it. Readers might also take the phrase as warning: nothing is quite what it seems in Argentinian Patricia Ratto's fascinating English-language debut. Translated by retired Spanish professor and...
*STARRED REVIEW Not until the last of this ingenious seven-story collection do readers get the most intimate glimpse of Don Henrik, and even then, only through the lens of his not-quite stepson. Henrik, however, is the single connecting character in Rodrigo Fuentes's U.S. debut, Trout, Belly...
Spare in pages, Elvira Navarro’s collection of 11 short stories proves dense with disconnection, dysfunction, and dismay as families fray, couples sunder, and animals are brutalized. Set between the seemingly familiar and elusively surreal, Navarro’s tales unsettle readers through oneiric landscapes. In “Rabbit Island,” a non-inventor...
*STARRED REVIEW "Accra is the perfect setting for noir fiction," writes Nana-Ama Danquah (Willow Weep for Me), Ghanaian American editor of this volume for Akashic Book's long-running Noir series. Hardly an endorsement for tourism, this spine-chilling 13-story collection offers an opportunity to "consider the context, beware...
*STARRED REVIEW Wall Street Journal correspondent Te-Ping Chen emerges as a fiction powerhouse, each of her 10 stories an immersive literary event. “Lulu,” which first appeared in the New Yorker, is a tale about the diverging life paths of twins, the overachieving daughter and the slacker...
Almost a decade since her debut collection, This Is Not Your City, Caitlin Horrocks returns with Life Among the Terranauts. The majority of these 14 stories deliver a gut-punch reminder of the seeming unavoidability of loneliness and isolation, despite the promises of coupledom, familial bonds, and understood...
Measured and controlled, Amy Landon expertly ciphers this 11-story collection with a sense of purposeful detachment, as if these women’s stories are too difficult, too harrowing to risk becoming too involved. Three stories, each highlighting erasure, emerge as standouts: in “Lizards,” an angry Floridian transplant...
For three years, I've been reading along with two fabulously erudite co-horts – my Library Journal editor Barbara Hoffert and fellow LJ reviewer Lawrence Olszewski – to recognize and celebrate the best translated world literature. This year, we had well over 100 titles to discuss, debate, negotiate,...
*STARRED REVIEW Introduced to Western audiences with the internationally awarded Bad Friends (2018), Ancco returns with a five-years-in-the-making collection she wrote in her early 20s, originally published more than a decade ago in her native Korea. Translated by prize-winning Canadian Janet Hong, these 13 stories are largely...
Hideo Yokoyama (Seventeen) might not yet have a following in the U.S. like some of his compatriot mystery writers – Keigo Higashino and Natsuo Kirino, for example – but the acclaim he's earned in his native Japan will likely spread to English-language readers. With Jonathan...
Korean American experience resonates in The Prince of Mournful Thoughts The longing for connection, for belonging, is woven throughout a dozen short stories in Caroline Kim’s superlative debut collection. "There is so much I wish to make my daughter understand, but cannot,” an immigrant father muses...
The genre-hopping, award-winning Mexican writer, poet, musician, and teacher Julián Herbert made his English-language debut with Tomb Song, an autobiographical novel focused on his relationship with his late mother, a prostitute dying of leukemia. His nonfiction The House of the Pain of Others is a hybrid...
*STARRED REVIEW Debut collections rarely prove even in quality and efficacy, which makes Jenny Bhatt's 15 compelling stories in Each of Us Killers even more memorable. Peripatetically spread across continents, Bhatt's characters are often caught between expectations, desires, and boundaries. Bhatt opens with a bang – literally. In...
