In this breathtaking final work, Daša Drndić’s fearless voice reaches new heights. Andreas Ban’s suicide attempt has failed. Though very ill, he still finds the will to tap on the glass of history to summon those imprisoned within. Mercilessly, he dissects society and his environment, shunning all favors as he goes after the evils and hidden secrets of our times. History remembers the names of the perpetrators, not the victims—Ban remembers and honors the lost.…

Highly acclaimed for The End of Eddy, Édouard Louis in Who Killed My Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French—at the minimum—of negligent homicide. “Racism,” he quotes Ruth Gilmore, “is the exposure of certain groups to premature death.” And Louis goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father—barely fifty years old, he can hardly walk or breathe: “You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.…

In late August a baby was born, or, as it seemed to me, a puma moved into my apartment, a near-mute force…. I had imagined that I was going to meet, at birth, a very sophisticated form of plant life, a form that I would daily deliver to an offsite greenhouse; I would look forward to getting to know the life-form properly later, when she had moved into a sentient kingdom, maybe around age three.…

A beautiful, brutal novel about the Spanish Civil War, Mazurka for Two Dead Men is the culmination of Camilo José Cela’s literary art. At the beginning of the war in 1936, Lionheart Gamuzo is savagely murdered. In 1939, as the war ends, his brother avenges his death. For both deaths, the blind accordion player plays the same mazurka. Set in backward rural Galicia, Cela’s novel portrays a reign of fools, and works like contrapuntal music, its themes calling and responding, alternately visceral, melancholy, funny, lyrical, and coarse.…

With the elliptical looping of a butterfly alighting on one’s sleeve, the poems of Ana Luísa Amaral arrive as small hypnotic miracles. Spare and beautiful in a way reminiscent both of Szymborska and of Emily Dickinson (it comes as no surprise that Amaral is the leading Portuguese translator of Dickinson), these poems—in Margaret Jull Costa’s gorgeous English versions—seamlessly interweave the everyday with the dreamlike and ask “What’s in a name?”…

Soon enough you realize that you are no longer twenty years old, because right away you are no longer young … and by the way, while you were thinking about other things, the world was also changing. And then, just as suddenly, you are fifty years old. Aira had anticipated his fiftieth—a time when he would not so much recall years past as look forward to what lies ahead—and yet that birthday came and went without much ado.…

Like those of Kafka, Poe, Leonora Carrington, or Shirley Jackson, Amparo Dávila’s stories are terrifying, mesmerizing, and expertly crafted—you’ll finish each one gasping for air. With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, who makes nightmares come to life through the everyday: loneliness sinks in easily like a razor-sharp knife, some sort of evil lurks in every shadow, delusion takes the form of strange and very real creatures.…