A bold, imaginative collection of short stories set in Southern Iraq from prolific, award-winning novelist Diaa Jubaili. Influenced in turn by the long tradition of Arabic folktales and the magical realism of Latin America, the stories in No Windmills in Basra reflect a reality tinged by the city’s history with war. Yet the fantastic and playful peek through, offering an astounding breadth of images in only a few lines per story. In “Mubarak,” a security guard for a chicken plant discovers his own wings after a bomb explosion. In “The Taste of Death,” long-buried Iraqi and Iranian soldiers rise from their unmarked graves, dissatisfied with the landscape’s returning verdancy. Set in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, where the author still lives, these fleeting stories oscillate between whimsy and tragedy.

Winner of the 2018 Albertine Prize Finalist for the 2018 Lamba Literary Awards Finalist for the 2018 French American Foundation Translation Prize Available in a new edition, Anne Garréta's sensual portrayal of trysts past. A tour de force of experimental queer feminist writing, Not One Day is renowned Oulipo member Anne Garréta's intimate exploration of the delicate connection between memory, fantasy, love, and desire. Garréta, author of the acclaimed genderless love story Sphinx and experimental novel In Concrete, vows to write every day about a woman from her past. With exquisite elegance, she revisits bygone loves and lusts, capturing memories of her past relationships in a captivating, erotic composition of momentary interactions and lasting impressions, of longing and of loss.

Our 2021 winter issue features Rory Gleeson on an Italian doctor who was at the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak; Lindsey Hilsum, author of the award-winning In Extremis, on cholera in Hutu refugee camps; and photography by Gus Palmer of an Islamic morgue in London, with an introduction by Poppy Sebag-Montefiore. Even more memoir comes from Ian Jack on the toxic slag heaps of Glasgow and the aristocratic lives built on them and Vidyan Ravinthiran on the civil war in Sri Lanka. A photoessay by Fergus Thomas of bareback horse racing in the Colville Reservation is accompanied by an interview with its subject, Duane Hall. Plus, an excerpt from Eva Baltasar's Permafrost, translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches; a new story by Paul Dalla Rosa, previously shortlisted for the 2019 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award; an extract from the new novel by Gwendoline Riley, author of First Love; fiction by Diaa Jubaili, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti; and fiction set in Philadelphia from Dan Shurley. Plus, poetry by Jason Allen-Paisant, Jesse Darling and Nate Duke.

A collection of sensitive, world-bending human portraits from short story writer N. Prabhakaran. A research scholar whose notebook reveals a surreal pig farm... A psychologist in search of the truth about one of his clients... An aspiring writer who emulates Gogol... The unforgettable men and women in N. Prabhakaran's stories have an uncanny ability to expose the fault lines between the real and the unreal, the normal and the mad, as they explore their own inner worlds and psychic wounds. A pioneer of the post-modern aesthetic turn, N. Prabhakaran weaves the nitty-gritty of everyday, small-town lives into his imaginative tales. Set in northern Kerala, these five stories are steeped in folklore, nature, factional politics and the intricacies of human relationships. Brilliantly translated by Jayasree Kalathil, Diary of a Malayali Madman marks the very first time this major Indian writer's work is available in English.

A poetry collection where personal is inevitably political and ecological, Motherfield is a poet’s insistence on self-determination in authoritarian, patriarchal Belarus. Julia Cimafiejeva was born in an area of rural Belarus that became a Chernobyl zone during her childhood. The book opens with a poet’s diary recording the course of violence unfolding in Belarus since its 2020 presidential election. Motherfield paints an intimate portrait of the poet’s struggle with fear, despair, and guilt as she goes to protests, escapes police, longs for readership, learns about the detention of family and friends, and ultimately chooses life in exile. But can she really escape the contaminated farmlands of her youth and her Belarusian mother tongue? Can she escape the radiation of her motherfield? This is the first collection of Julia Cimafiejeva’s poetry in English, prepared by cotranslators and poets Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib.

A story of global travel, personal growth, and family responsibility through the lens of a teenage girl in 1969. Fifteen-year-old Jane was trapped. Trapped in high school in Dallas, Texas where her classes were too easy and her classmates were too conventional. Trapped in service to her mother, a polio survivor who used a wheelchair. When her parents sold their automobile brake-repair business in 1969, they withdrew Jane from her high school to travel the world, visiting India, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, Yugoslavia and Northern Europe. As she traveled, Jane was pushed to reconcile her dual role as responsible daughter and as teen in the late sixties, the era of Bobby Fischer, The Beatles, and Hair. Because the World is Round reckons with what it means to be an individual, a caretaker, and a traveler in a vast and changing world.

Yanick Lahens leads us into a breathless intrigue with her newest portrait of Haiti, Sweet Undoings. In Port-au-Prince, violence never consumes. It finds its counterpart in a "high-pitched sweetness", a sweetness that overwhelms Francis, a French journalist, one evening at the Corossol Restaurant-Bar, when the broken, rich voice of lounge singer Brune rises from the microphone. Brune's father, Judge Berthier, was assassinated, guilty of maintaining integrity in a city where everything is bought. Six months after this disappearance, Brune wholly refuses to come to terms with what happened. Her uncle Pierre, a gay man who spent his youth abroad to avoid persecution, refuses to give up on solving this unpunished crime. Alongside Brune and Pierre, Francis becomes acquainted with myriad other voices of Port-au-Prince, including Ézèchiel, a poet desperate to escape his miserable neighborhood; Waner, a diligent pacifist; and Ronny the American, at ease in Haiti as in a second homeland. Drawing its power from the bowels of the city, Sweet Undoings moves with a rapid, electric syncopation, gradually and tenderly revealing the richness of the lives within.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 by the New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, The Financial Times, Words Without Borders A highly-acclaimed master work of fiction from Mircea Cărtărescu, author of Blinding, Solenoid is an existence (and eventually a cosmos) created by forking paths. Based on Cărtărescu's own experience as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. The novel is grounded in the reality of Romania in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including frightening health care, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life, while on a broad scale Solenoid's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines attempt to reconcile the realms of life and art. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis preventorium, encounters with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the miniscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide. One character asks another: When you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? Combining fiction with autobiography and history—Nikola Tesla and Charles Hinton, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript—Solenoid searches for escape routes through the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various monstrous realities erupt within the present.

Based on a true story set in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, The Purchased Bride tells the tale of Maria, a Greek girl who was bought at age fifteen by a much older, wealthy Ottoman man. As the Ottoman Empire falls and insurgents torch their Greek village in the Caucasus, Maria and her parents flee and find shelter in a refugee camp across the border in Ottoman territory. Cholera and plague are impending, and the priest running the camp takes a desperate measure, arranging to marry Maria off to a wealthy Ottoman Turk in the capital. She and her best friend, Lita, then travel toward the Black Sea coast through a fascinating world of ancient and forgotten Ottoman mountain communities. They encounter escalating violence, sniper attacks, and marauding troops amid the Empire’s collapse, as breakaway provinces declare themselves independent caliphates in defiance of the Sultan. And when Lita escapes, Maria is left to face her fate alone. A story of war, struggle, and ultimate success, based on the life of Constantine’s grandmother, The Purchased Bride sheds light on a turbulent and dangerous part of history.

Ischia is a portrait of an unnamed narrator and her friends: wandering through the margins of different cities, especially Buenos Aires, they search for purpose in an increasingly uncertain world. An intricate, gutsy, and raw novel, Ischia is populated with outsiders who navigate the vicissitudes of life in Argentina and the world. Ischia, the female narrator, is the youngest in a family of seven brothers and relates her experiences as she waits for a ride to the airport. Told through dizzying would-have, could-have conditionals, Ischia overlaps and blurs the past, present, and future of three young characters defined by lack of certainty or expectation. These three lives unfold between disenchantment and humor, and the narration transports readers into a world of memories, desires, and dreams. The novel advances lyrically through themes both solemn and lighthearted, shaping the contours of imagined, hilarious, and surreal experiences.