Edgar Bendler is twenty-four years old and lost in his loss. His girlfriend is gone—perhaps missing, perhaps dead. His cat, too. Life between university terms looms, and without the distraction of study, Ed is likely to throw himself... Read More

Vigorously potent, "Little Beast" haunts the intersection of fairy tales with gritty realism. When a full beard emerges on a nameless eleven-year-old girl’s face, she and her mother conceal the development from judgment in their tiny... Read More

This troubling, complicated literary novel delves into the experiences of mental illness, questioning some of our most basic beliefs about what it means to be insane. "Insane" by Rainald Goetz is a complex, multivoiced, experimental look... Read More

Moshe Sakal’s "The Diamond Setter" is a spellbinding saga of love and family secrets. Characters’ stories overlap, all connected by a famous blue diamond: Sabakh. A handsome young man, Fareed, smuggles a piece of Sabakh across the... Read More

"Black Sugar" opens as pirate Henry Morgan dies clutching his gold, his ship sinking under a Caribbean forest. In this moment of vivid magical realism, Miguel Bonnefoy sets the stakes for his novel—sunken treasure in the islands and... Read More

Masatsugu Ono’s "Lion Cross Point" is an atmospheric, melancholy tale about memory and absence. Ten-year-old Takeru arrives at his mother’s childhood village by the sea. Under the care of a relative, Mitsuko, he settles into a... Read More

"The Bottom of the Sky" is about two boys, Isaac and Ezra, who are science-fiction fans. They fall in love with a girl they meet at one of their sci-fi club meetings. But it also revolves around a mysterious science-fiction novel called... Read More

Andreas Izquierdo’s "The Happiness Bureau" centers on a government employee, Albert Happy, whose tenderness may just redeem the role of bureaucracies. Happy is a decades-long employee of the Agency of Administrative Affairs; he runs... Read More