An old Eastern European woman living alone in a remote village where people don’t pay any attention to her becomes involved in a murder mystery somehow connected to William Blake’s poetry while at odds with the police, who don’t take her seriously.
Read MoreWritten in simple but evocative prose, One Part Woman is both engaging in its social commentary and haunting in its portrayal of a relationship gradually falling apart due to outside pressures.
Read MoreAtlantic Winds, a debut novella by William Prendiville, is a sharp and suspenseful examination of the small-town mentality and the devastating effects that gossip and harassment can have on a person’s life.
Read MoreNayeri blends memoir and reportage in beautiful, powerful prose, intertwining her own memories of fleeing Iran as a child with the more recent narratives gathered from other refugees. Timely and empathetic, The Ungrateful Refugee will force many readers to confront and re-evaluate their assumptions – even (or especially) those arising from good intentions.
Read MoreMarsman’s The Following Scan Will Last Five Minutes, translated from the Dutch by Sophie Collins, is a poetry and prose collection on the writer’s experience with cancer. She evokes the writings of Audre Lorde and Susan Sontag and strikes a balance in her own writing between the personal honesty of Lorde and the social considerations of Sontag.
Read MoreBujar moves across nationalities and genders, becoming a Bosnian student in Berlin, a Spanish actor in New York, or a Turkish singer in Helsinki. Haunting and original, Crossing is an evocative exploration of loneliness, belonging, and the boundaries of self-invention.
Read MoreA stand-out debut poetry collection by a writer who has built a distinct voice, Tap Out paints a landscape of American life that is vivid in the small, mundane actions of the characters that inhabit it, and overwhelms with its sincerity.
Read MoreBindlestiff presents a post-apocalyptic-looking landscape that has seen the disintegration of the federal system and of the internet, along with the socio-economic structures that held the country together. But this post-apocalyptic image is just that – an image conjured by a script written by @waynex in the process of getting the Hollywood treatment.
Read MoreIn The Governesses, Anne Serre builds an enchanted, magic atmosphere where everything happens in the shadows. She employs language and imagery that bring the fairytale staples back to their dark, sexually-charged roots while at the same time exploring masculinity and gender dynamics through a feminist lens.
Read MoreQuirky and captivating, Liar is a nuanced examination of how assumptions and fabricated stories can take on a life of their own, becoming the backbone of our identity and relationships. But this is a lot more than a story about false accusations.
Read MoreThe conditions that led to Zweig’s departure from Vienna and eventually Europe all too closely resemble the current climate. The amalgamation of rising xenophobia, Brexit, the rising popularity of the mildly-labelled “alt-right” in France, The Netherlands, Italy, and particularly in Poland and Hungary, would surely inspire the same feeling of despair in Zweig if he were living today.
Read MoreFrom the very first pages, Animalia establishes itself as a text that demands attention and rewards it with visceral prose that doesn’t simply create a world, but becomes part of its very fabric. It’s dense in a way that every page holds its own weight. The action is focused on movements rather than events – the routine is settled early on, and every activity in the characters’ lives is simultaneously mundane and vital.
Read MoreRilke went to Paris in 1902 to write a monograph on acclaimed sculptor Auguste Rodin. This was only the beginning of his love affair with Paris, a city which he would leave and return to again several times between his first visit and his death in Switzerland in 1926. Rilke in Paris is the combination of his own reflections on Paris and the observations of his French translator, Maurice Betz.
Read MoreIn these stories, Jamie Quatro’s blend of intimacy and a sense of faith in the divine is ever-present in the prose and dialogue. But, more than faith, the defining quality of these characters is a sense of devotion – not necessarily to something holy by definition, but to something deeply personal to them.
Read MoreAnyone who picked up The Years last year does not need to be convinced that Happening is a memoir of the highest calibre by an author who writes with such honesty and precision about the most personal of stories. Annie Ernaux offers a glimpse into a difficult and lonely period of her life as “something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”
Read MoreDespite being unable to see it to completion and publication, Leonard Cohen offers in The Flame a collection of writing that stands proudly at the end of his body of work, which spans over six decades and includes fourteen studio albums, two novels, and nine poetry collections.
Read MoreAfter the success of Man Booker International Prize Winner Flights, Fitzcarraldo Editions return with a new Olga Tokarczuk novel. Originally published in Poland in 2009, Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead was translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Far from the “constellation-novel” form of Flights that Tokarczuk opts for in many of her later works, it presents itself as a reinvention of the gothic noir and crime novel.
Read MoreAfter having published carefully researched and masterfully written books on drinking, writing, and loneliness, Olivia Laing put out Crudo last week. A fictional story set in a very non-fictional moment in time, Crudo is in essence an attempt to capture, and make sense of, the experience of living through the summer of 2017, and going through that experience one moment at a time.
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