Translated from Spanish by Robin MyersPublished by Charco Press, 2024, 157 pages. Original version published in 2019. “I’d say you start existing in a kind of limbo. That’s where I live now, that’s what this whole town is: limbo. That’s what heroin is too. You’re halfway between the world of the living and the world …
Continue reading Last Date in El Zapotal: Mateo García Elizondo
Published by Penguin Classics, 2022, 203 pages. Original stories published 1894–1905. A dying wife summons her husband’s youngest concubine under the guise of handing over her husband’s welfare to the young woman; a monk wandering in a desolate landscape is persuaded by a poor man to spend the night in his home; and a dead …
Published by SFWP, 2025, 251 pages “My wedding dress was made by a costume designer I met while buying weed at the 7-Eleven one February, which is also where I met Jimbo, my husband to be. I went to the 7-Eleven every day. I liked standing around the counter, drinking coffee and talking to Plots, …
Published by University of Hawai'i Press, 2019, 358 pages “The work remains of breaking down myths and building up re-visioned ones that empower rather than demean. It remains to tell new stories that are really ancient ones, persisting in our blood, paradoxically and endearingly both familiar and breathtakingly novel, stories that deconstruct the lies and …
Published by Jonathan Cape, 2025, 301 pages The United Kingdom, 2119. Tom Metcalfe, an academic, studies the 1990s to the 2030s, a period he romanticizes. Looking back, this was a time of plenty: when you could go into a supermarket and buy anything you wanted, walk for miles on dry ground, and be surrounded by …
Published by Jonathan Cape London / Random House, 2025, 254 pages This is Salman Rushdie’s latest book, a collection of three longish stories bookended by two short ones. Given the attack on him that almost killed him and the fact that he is now 78, it is not surprising that many of the stories deal …
Published by Granta Books / W.W. Norton & Company, 2025, 368 pages “The only way to really remember is to forget everything and let time fill the story up. To reach it through a different doorway. Things have to inhabit the living or else disappear from the world and cease to exist. If things survive …
Translated from Portuguese by Helen LanePublished by Picador / Alfred A. Knopf, 1989, 663 pages. Original version published in 1984. This multigenerational story set mostly in Brazil is centred around Madruga, a Galician who leaves Spain in the early 20th century for the new world in the hope of making his fortune. When the book …
Published by Vintage, 2022, 482 pagesReview by Usha Raman and Suroor Alikhan This is the story of a friendship—one that survives betrayals and tragedies. Two 11-year-olds meet in a paediatric hospital. Sam Masur is there after a horrific accident has smashed his foot, leaving him traumatized and refusing to speak. Sadie Green is there because …
Continue reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: Gabrielle Zevin
Translated from French by Walter J. CobbPublished by Penguin, 1964 (this translation), 501 pages. Original version published in 1831. What makes a monster? Quasimodo, the bell ringer of Notre Dame, is physically deformed: he has a humpback, a protrusion on his chest, and only one eye because the other is covered by a wart. As …
