Mark Valentine: Lost Estates
Mark Valentine’s collection of short stories, Lost Estates (2024) is bookended by two long tales that begin with journeys through an England abundant in history and arcana and ultimately end…
Jon Fosse: Boathouse
“I don’t go out anymore, a restlessness has come over me, and I don’t go out.” is how Baard, the narrator of Jon Fosse’s Boathouse (1989, tr: May-Brit Akerholt, 2017),…
Colin MacIntyre: When the Needle Drops
Musicians penning novels is nothing new. Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave have done it to considerable acclaim. Morrissey’s “unpolished turd” took a beating while Pete Townshend’s recent effort was seen…
Saraid de Silva: Amma
Amma (2024) by Saraid de Silva is a time-hopping, peripatetic debut novel that explores the matrilineal line of a single family over three generations. Though it chronologically runs from 1951…
Gemma Amor: The Folly
Morgan never believed her father killed her mother. She spent the last six years of her life actively campaigning for his release, which eventually resulted in a mistrial ruling and…
Hanna Komar: Ribwort
Hanna Komar’s Ribwort (2022, tr: 2023) is a poetry collection that calls for healing, using the titular plant as a metaphor for soothing emotional wounds. It’s a bilingual edition, showing…
William McIllvanney: Laidlaw
Love or hate the term, William McIlvanney became the father of ‘Tartan Noir’ after his fourth novel, Laidlaw (1977). Many of today’s Scottish crime writers, like Ian Rankin, cite its…
González Macías: A Brief Atlas of the Lighthouses at the End of the World
In an epigraph, referring to Jules Verne’s posthumous novel, The Lighthouse at the End of the World (1905), González Macías tells how Verne never set foot in Argentina, where the…
Jon Fosse: Scenes from a Childhood
Scenes From a Childhood (tr: Damion Searls, 2018) is a selection of Jon Fosse’s short fiction that spans 1987 through 2013. It contains five pieces that showcase the Nobel laureate’s…
Yukio Mishima: The Frolic of the Beasts
While I actually finished The Frolic of the Beasts (1961, tr: Andrew Clare, 2018) by Yukio Mishima way back at the end of January, I’ve sat on it, wondering what…