A beloved children’s author turns to historical fiction as an interrogation of patriarchy and weaponized faith in this gorgeous account of the Norwegian witch trials of 1618, perpetrated equally as sexual and religious terror and the assimilation and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Sami people. Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies reveals mechanisms of … Continue reading The Mercies, Kiran Millwood Hargrave Britain
An instant classic which has been anointed as the “Doctor Zhivago of Iran” by no less an eminence than Margaret Atwood, Nazanine Hozar’s Aria is an epic drama of the people and history forged in the 1979 Revolution, filled with vivid Dickensian characters from Tehran’s myriads of social classes, faiths, nationalities, and centered on the … Continue reading Aria, Nazanine Hozar Islamic Peoples- Iran
From the disciple of Proust who carries onward Truman Capote’s weaponization of gossip and Oscar Wilde’s art of the epigrammatic phrase, in a classic doppelganger story which interrogates themes of identity, otherness, and belonging in an allegorical fable of two sisters, one who becomes a nun in Columbia, the other who becomes a society … Continue reading A Saint from Texas by Edmund White American
A glorious celebration of language as our primary identity and instrument of self construction, referential to the mission of Wittgenstein and his protégé James Joyce to reinvent and liberate humankind through language, Eley Williams’ The Liar’s Dictionary is a romantic comedy which recalls A.S. Byatt’s masterpiece Possession, but also a metaphysical novel which recalls Iris … Continue reading The Liar’s Dictionary, Eley Williams Britain
In Joycean stream of consciousness which immerses us in the protagonist’s well of memories and the traumatic legacy of poverty, addiction, and violence, Andrzej Tichý’s debut novel Wretchedness interrogates the failure of Sweden’s utopian socialism in a way which recalls Anthony Burgess’s iconic A Clockwork Orange. His use of addiction as a … Continue reading Wretchedness, Andrzej Tichý Scandanavian lit- Sweden
A Surrealist dream journey across time which negotiates the interface between the historical and the mythic, Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day is both fantasy and Magical Realist, detective novel and philosophy, filled with conversations which recall Dostoevsky, bizarre and fantastic elements which recall Angela Carter, and a storyline which parallels Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. … Continue reading Untold Night and Day, Bae Suah Korea
Epistemic doubts regarding certainty, objective reality, and the limits of knowledge; Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World is a philosophical meditation and a novel of obscure associations constructed as a cinematic montage or a set of puzzle boxes linked by strings of images and motifs. Written in the belles-lettres tradition … Continue reading When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labatut Netherlands & Latin America- Chile
Feminist reimaginations of traditional Japanese ghost stories which recall the dark fairytales of Angela Carter, Matsuda Aoko’s Where the Wild Ladies Are presents seizures of power and acts of transgression in a gorgeous confection of Surrealist poetry and vision. Here the spirit world intermingles with ours not as horror or grotesques which question … Continue reading Where the Wild Ladies Are, Matsuda Aoko Japan
A glorious Absurdist satire which extend’s Swift’s classic A Modest Proposal in the tradition of Samuel Beckett, Kobo Abe, and Thomas Ligotti, and uses cannibalism as a metaphor of capitalism to interrogate the consequences of dehumanization and commodification as theft of the soul, of our modern pathology of disconnectedness and of the failure of … Continue reading Tender Is the Flesh, Agustina Bazterrica Latin American Lit- Argentina
Absurdist and provocateur, Anakana Schofield pursues her investigation of Irish society and the human condition in Bina, a Humanist-Existentialist satire which exemplifies my idea of the purpose of art; to incite, provoke, and disturb. Bina is a Pythian seeress, a Jester of King Lear, hilarious and wise, among a circus of Faulkneresque characters lost … Continue reading Bina, Anakana Schofield Britain
Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium 