Here is my periodic listing of new literature coming your way. As usual, my choices are a mixed bag that crosses genres and international borders. The list gives you the publishers' synopses of the various books, cover art, date of release, and links to the books and authors. The rest is up to you. A couple of these are available this year, the other two are planned for January and February. I have to say, each book in this quartet sounds intriguing, even adventurous, in diverse and particular ways. Happy reading.
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A novel of glamour, surveillance, and corruption in contemporary Cuba, from an internationally bestselling author–who has never before been translated into English.
Cleo, scion of a once-prominent Cuban family and a promising young writer in her own right, travels to Spain to collect a prestigious award. There, Cuban expats view her with suspicion–assuming she’s an informant for the Castro regime. To Cleo’s surprise, that suspicion follows her home to Cuba, where she finds herself under constant surveillance by the government. When she meets and falls in love with a Hollywood filmmaker, she discovers her family is not who she thought they were . . . and neither is the filmmaker.
Wendy Guerra is a Cuban poet and novelist. After a career acting in Cuban film and television, she turned to writing and won recognition in international circles. Her works have been translated into thirteen languages.
Minotaur Books - Dec. 18, 2018
In this follow-up to Nicolás Obregón’s critically acclaimed Blue Light Yokohama, Inspector Iwata returns—in a murder case in his new home of Los Angeles.
After a brutal investigation ripped apart his life, Kosuke Iwata quit both his job as a detective with the Tokyo Police Department and his country, leaving Japan for the sunnier shores of Los Angeles, California. But, although he’s determined to leave his past behind, murder still follows him.
Having set up shop as a private investigator, Iwata is approached by someone from his old life. Her daughter has been killed and the case has gone cold. Out of loyalty, Iwata agrees to take on the case and reinvestigate the homicide. However, what seems initially like a cold-blooded but simple murder takes a complex turn when a witness, a vagrant, recalls the killer's parting words: “I’m sorry.”
From the depths of Skid Row to the fatal expanse of the Sonoran Desert, Iwata tracks the disparate pieces of a mysterious and heartbreaking puzzle. But the more he unearths, the more complex this simple act of murder becomes.
Nicolás Obregón is a Londoner, a Madrileño, and a full-time writer. He has worked as a security steward, a travel writer, an overnight guardian, an ice rink attendant, a bookseller, a post boy, an editor in legal publishing, and an odd-jobs man for a failed mineral water company. (Not in that order).
His first novel, Blue Light Yokohama, was published in 2017 across the world. It was conceived while travelling on a bullet train from Hiroshima to Kyoto.
The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Experience, Nocilla Lab
Agustín Fernández Mallo, translated by Thomas Bunstead
His first novel, Blue Light Yokohama, was published in 2017 across the world. It was conceived while travelling on a bullet train from Hiroshima to Kyoto.
Agustín Fernández Mallo, translated by Thomas Bunstead
Farrar, Straus and Giroux - January 15, 2019
A landmark in contemporary Spanish literature, Agustin Fernandez Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy—Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Lab, and Nocilla Experience—presents multiple narratives of people and places that reflect America and the world in the digital age of the twenty-first century.
In the middle of the Nevada desert stands a solitary poplar tree covered in hundreds of pairs of shoes. Farther along Route 50, a lonely prostitute falls in love with a collector of found photographs. In Las Vegas, an Argentine man builds a peculiar monument to Jorge Luis Borges. On the run from the authorities, Kenny takes up permanent residence in the legal non-place of Singapore International Airport, while the novelists Enrique Vila-Matas and Agustín Fernández Mallo encounter each other on an oil rig.
These are just a few of the narrative strands that make up Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy—Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Experience, and Nocilla Lab. Greeted as a landmark in contemporary Spanish literature, the entire trilogy has not been available in English until now.
Agustín Fernández Mallo was born in La Coruña, Spain in 1967. Before devoting himself full-time to his fiction and poetry, he worked for many years as an experimental physicist. His collected poems were published in Spain in 2012.
Death Is Hard Work
Khaled Khalifa, translated by Leri Price
Farrar, Straus and Giroux - February 12, 2019
A dogged, absurd quest through the nightmare of the Syrian civil war.
Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work is the new novel from the greatest chronicler of Syria’s ongoing and catastrophic civil war: a tale of three ordinary people facing down the stuff of nightmares armed with little more than simple determination.
Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is estranged from his siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to Anabiya, which is—after all—only a two-hour drive from Damascus.
There’s only one problem: Their country is a war zone.
With the landscape of their childhood now a labyrinth of competing armies whose actions are at once arbitrary and lethal, the siblings’ decision to set aside their differences and honor their father’s request quickly balloons from a minor commitment into an epic and life-threatening quest. Syria, however, is no longer a place for heroes, and the decisions the family must make along the way—as they find themselves captured and recaptured, interrogated, imprisoned, and bombed—will prove to have enormous consequences for all of them.
Agustín Fernández Mallo was born in La Coruña, Spain in 1967. Before devoting himself full-time to his fiction and poetry, he worked for many years as an experimental physicist. His collected poems were published in Spain in 2012.
Khaled Khalifa, translated by Leri Price
Farrar, Straus and Giroux - February 12, 2019
A dogged, absurd quest through the nightmare of the Syrian civil war.
Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work is the new novel from the greatest chronicler of Syria’s ongoing and catastrophic civil war: a tale of three ordinary people facing down the stuff of nightmares armed with little more than simple determination.
Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is estranged from his siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to Anabiya, which is—after all—only a two-hour drive from Damascus.
There’s only one problem: Their country is a war zone.
With the landscape of their childhood now a labyrinth of competing armies whose actions are at once arbitrary and lethal, the siblings’ decision to set aside their differences and honor their father’s request quickly balloons from a minor commitment into an epic and life-threatening quest. Syria, however, is no longer a place for heroes, and the decisions the family must make along the way—as they find themselves captured and recaptured, interrogated, imprisoned, and bombed—will prove to have enormous consequences for all of them.
Khaled Khalifa was born in 1964 near Aleppo, Syria. He is the fifth child of a family of thirteen siblings. He studied law at Aleppo University and actively participated in the foundation of Aleph magazine with a group of writers and poets. A few months later, the magazine was closed down by Syrian censorship. Active on the arts scene in Damascus where he lives, Khalifa is a writer of screenplays for television and cinema.
Later.
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Manuel Ramos writes crime fiction. His latest book is The Golden Havana Night: A Sherlock Homie Mystery (Arte Público Press, 2018.)
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