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The Shortlist

Four New Books in Translation Test the Bounds of Reality

A roundup of international fiction from Congo, Sweden, Bolivia and India.

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By Anderson Tepper

Anderson Tepper is curator of international literature at City of Asylum in Pittsburgh.

  • Feb. 18, 2024

Fiston Mwanza Mujila, the award-winning Congolese author of “Tram 83,” writes novels and poetry that move to an infectious, syncopated rhythm. His latest work, THE VILLAIN’S DANCE (Deep Vellum, 279 pp., paperback, $16.95), especially revels in this spirit. In 1990s Zaire, where Mobutu Sese Seko’s reign is on its last legs, survival is itself an elaborate hustle. The Kinshasa nightclubs are packed, the streets teeming with teenage runaways and rumors of insurrection. Just across the border, in an Angola racked by civil war, the diamond mines are a magnet for get-rich dreamers.

All the characters have their own dilemmas to work out: Sanza, who has fallen in with a glue-sniffing street gang; Molakisi, eager to reinvent himself in Angola; Franz, an Austrian writer who spends more time at the Mambo de la Fête than working on his “African” novel. The plots and vendettas zig and zag, eventually intersecting. Throughout, the voices of the children strike some of the book’s most compelling notes. “We had the experience of the street — glue, rivalries with opposing gangs, rain, tangles with soldiers — yet people always insisted on saddling us with the pompous, dreary label of child,” bemoans Sanza.

Mujila’s frenetic energy is captured in rapturous language by Roland Glasser, translating from the French. Recalling the gritty, exuberant novels of the South African Zakes Mda (“Ways of Dying”) and the Congolese Alain Mabanckou (“African Psycho”), Mujila has brought to life a feverish tale of Africa’s underclass, whose demands — like the author’s — are hard to resist. As one character remarks, “We want reality, the mines, the glue, the Villain’s Dance!”

The book cover of “The Villain’s Dance,” by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, shows the text of the title and author on a green and blue background.

If “The Villain’s Dance” is immersed in Congolese reality, Balsam Karam’s THE SINGULARITY (Feminist Press, 219 pp., paperback, $16.95) — though also concerned with the marginalized and ignored — hovers at a distance from its material.

In an unnamed coastal city, children congregate in sweltering alleyways and abandoned lots, far from the tourists who flock to the seaside cafes. The youths and their families are migrants from an embattled foreign land, unsure how to navigate this new world. Young women are disappearing — possibly abducted — including a girl simply called the Missing One. Her mother desperately looks for her everywhere, while her grandmother quietly keeps vigil: “From here she can see the movement of loss and doesn’t know what to do; she sees it all the time and fears it as she sits there watching over the alley.”

Karam — who is of Kurdish ancestry and moved to Sweden as a young child — has an eye for poignant shifts in perspectives. The story of a mother searching for her daughter runs parallel to that of a visitor, herself a former refugee and soon-to-be mother, wrestling with her own history of displacement. The two narratives refract and then come together in a poetic convergence. There is a haunting, hushed tone to the novel, neatly evoked by Saskia Vogel’s translation from the Swedish, that probes the disorienting effects of exile. As Karam writes of the bereft mother of the Missing One: “The inner distances are greater — between memory and memory and from experience to experience time no longer passes, and the woman does not know where she is or why.”

The Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi’s debut story collection, YOU GLOW IN THE DARK (New Directions, 112 pp., paperback, $14.95), in a lively translation by Chris Andrews, is an eerie mix of the familiar and unreal. The stories take place in prehistoric caves and peasant villages, but also feature nuclear power plants, interstellar travel and drones.

Colanzi writes with a sense of menace about power clashes in a landscape that often resembles the Bolivian Altiplano. Her characters speak versions of Spanish and Aymara, and are preoccupied with threats both real and imagined (radiation, poison, the Devil). The title story, based on a radiological accident in Brazil in 1987, takes on an otherworldly quality in Colanzi’s hands. Local citizens, engulfed by “the glow of death, the phosphorescence of sin,” are left to ponder the existential meaning of this unnatural disaster.

In another story, “The Narrow Way,” teenage sisters dream of escaping their father’s religious cult; they’re held captive in a compound where “beyond the perimeter lies the jungle with its shadows, and beyond that, the city with its illusions.” An “obedience collar” keeps them from crossing a magnetic field that delivers increasingly powerful shocks. Will they ever experience freedom, and what will be its consequences?

Like other Latin American writers such as Samanta Schweblin, Fernanda Melchor and Mónica Ojeda, Colanzi is intent on blending genres (horror, cyberpunk, literary fiction). Her reality is a warped one, shifting between a violent past and frightening future, where the heat and toxic radiation — and the babble of inner voices — combine to create a hallucinatory vision.

The Kashmiri writer Hari Krishna Kaul’s stories, on the other hand, are firmly rooted in his contested homeland in the late 20th century. Kaul, who died in exile in 2009 at the age of 75, left an intricate body of work that amounts to sly, detailed portraits of domestic life set against the backdrop of religious and political tensions.

But even when Kaul’s tales focus on the mundane, fault lines open up. Several stories in his collection FOR NOW, IT IS NIGHT (Archipelago, 205 pp., paperback, $22) involve crushing bouts of loneliness and despair, often prompted by the isolation of curfews and avalanches. “For now, it is night. For now, it is dark. For now, it is cold. In this darkness and this cold, I am alone,” reflects a housebound character in the title story. In “Tomorrow — A Never-Ending Story,” things take a surreal turn as two boys repeat their grade-school class for decades, failing to age as the town around them transforms.

“For Now, It Is Night” is an enthralling — and welcome — reclamation of Kaul’s fiction by a team of four translators (including his niece, Kalpana Raina). Kaul’s work shimmers with questions of reality and illusion, home and exile. “Just like the stalled traffic which had begun to move,” thinks a Kashmiri adrift in Delhi in “A Moment of Madness,” “his stagnant life would be revitalized if he allowed himself to think about Kashmir again.” But, as Kaul reminds us, it’s never that easy. “A person may walk or take a flight,” the character later muses, “but can a destination ever be reached?”

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‘New York Times’ Reveals Its Best Books of 2021

BY Michael Schaub • Nov. 29, 2021

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The New York Times Book Review unveiled its list of the 10 best books of the year , with titles by Honorée Fannone Jeffers, Patricia Lockwood, and Clint Smith among those making the cut.

Jeffers was honored for her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , which was a finalist for this year’s Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award.

Lockwood made the list for her Booker Prize-finalist No One Is Talking About This , while Imbolo Mbue was honored for her novel How Beautiful We Were . The other two works of fiction selected by the Times were Intimacies by Katie Kitamura and the genre-defying When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West. Kitamura’s novel made the National Book Award fiction longlist, while Labatut’s book was on the prize’s translated literature shortlist.

Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America , also longlisted for the National Book Award,was one of the nonfiction books to make the Times list, along with Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth .

Other nonfiction books on the list included Andrea Elliott’s Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City and Tove Ditlevsen’s memoir cycle,  The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency , translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman.

Rounding out the list was Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath . The biography, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, was published in 2020; when asked on Twitter why it was named one of the Times’ notable books of 2021, Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul explained , “We used to make the cut after the Holiday issue and carry the titles over [to the] following year. Moving forward, it’s the full calendar year.”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.

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review of books new york times

review of books new york times

The New York Times Reveals Their 10 Best Books Of 2021

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Carina Pereira

Carina Pereira, born in ‘87, in Portugal. Moved to Belgium in 2011, and to Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in 2019. Avid reader, changing interests as the mods strikes. Whiles away the time by improvising stand-up routines she’ll never get to perform. Books are a life-long affair, audiobooks a life-changing discovery of adulthood. Selling books by day, writer by night. Contact

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As the end of the year approaches, various platforms start putting together a selection of the books they believe deserve to have the literary spotlight of the last 365 days.

From Goodreads Choice Awards , to the Top Five Books Of The Year At Amazon , these lists are often a great way to compare what is going around our own social media bubble, and what the mainstream media and platforms deem the best of. (Amazon’s list has one book in common with the New York Times. Read this whole post and see if you can guess which one before you click that link.)

Book Riot is obviously not an exception in this matter – we are always down to tell you all about our favourite reads – and you can check out the books we held most dear to our hearts in 2021 here .

The 10 Best Books Of The Year as it is currently presented by The New York Times has been going on since pretty much the beginning of the Book Review magazine, back in 1896.

After several changes across the years, in 2004 the list has taken the shape that is still being used today: as fall arrives, the editors start reading, discussing, and choosing what will become their definitive list of the ten best books of the year.

These are their choices for 2021:

  • How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
  • Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
  • The Love Song Of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
  • No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
  • When We Cease To Understand The World by Benjamín Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West
  • The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman
  • How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith
  • Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope In An American City by Andrea Elliott
  • On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed
  • Red Comet: The Short Life And Blazing Art Of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark

As it’s common with the New York Times 10 Best Books Of The Year lists, the first five books are labelled under the genre literary fiction, and the other five are works of non-fiction, although Labatut is said to stand on the edge of both.

This year’s list includes two books in translation. Or, if we are in the mood to be pedantic, we can say it actually includes four, since Ditlevsen’s are actually three books put together and they can be found and purchased on their own (nice little way to include 12 books in a list of 10, New York Times!). Likewise, you’ll find several important works around social justice themes, including class and race, both fiction and non-fiction.

The Love Songs Of W.E.B Du Bois was one of the picks of Oprah’s Book Club 2021. It was also nominated for Time’s best books of 2021. Similarly, other books on the above list also fell under the Time’s 2021 best of non-fiction: Juneteenth , How The Word Is Passed , Invisible Child , and The Copenhagen Trilogy .

Fifty percent of the books nominated were written by authors of colour. Last year, this same list included forty percent authors of colour.

Read more about each of the 10 books listed above in this link. And for those with full access to the New York Times website, here are 100 Notable Books released in 2021 that their editors put together.

review of books new york times

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Celebrating the 125th Anniversary of The New York Times Book Review

This year marks the 125th anniversary of the Book Review, which Adolph S. Ochs established as a standalone supplement on Oct. 10, 1896. Read more in a note from Pamela Paul and Tina Jordan.

This year marks the 125th anniversary of The New York Times Book Review, which Adolph S. Ochs established as a standalone supplement on Oct. 10, 1896, shortly after he took over as publisher. The first issue, then called the Saturday Review of Books and Art, was eight pages long and featured news on the cover, including a story about Oscar Wilde’s travails in prison and another about the threat department stores posed to independent booksellers. We have been covering the world of books, authors and ideas ever since. Today, the Book Review remains the only freestanding newspaper book review in the country, a central component of The Times that distinguishes us from all our competitors and makes us the preeminent place for literary journalism in the country. That’s a lot to celebrate!

To mark this achievement, we are planning a year-long celebration that will culminate in a live October event, with a special print section commemorating the anniversary, and the publication of a book by Tina Jordan, deputy editor of the Book Review, that celebrates the Book Review’s storied history. Until then, you will find stories throughout the year highlighting archival gems combined with work from the most exciting literary authors working today. We begin with a piece that spotlights 25 great writers who have contributed to our pages , from H.G. Wells to Toni Morrison. In February we will look back at love stories over time and an essay by Parul Sehgal that examines and reassesses the critical legacy of The Times’s books coverage.

Each month, we’ll resurface some of the best, worst, funniest, strangest and most influential coverage from our pages in our digital report and on the back page of the Book Review. We’ll offer a dedicated segment to the anniversary in our weekly Book Review podcast (which is celebrating an anniversary of its own: 15 years in April, making it the longest-running podcast at The Times). You will see snippets of our past coverage highlighted on our social channels — Instagram, Twitter and Facebook — and in the Book Review newsletter every week. In other words, there will be a lot to read, but we couldn’t think of a better place for that particular activity than the Book Review.

As an editor’s note from 1897 points out, “Life is worth living because there are books.”

We look forward to celebrating the anniversary with all of you.

Pamela and Tina

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Pamela paul to oversee daily and sunday book coverage, jennifer szalai named new nonfiction critic, nyt book review publishes first art-themed issue.

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review of books new york times

The New York Times Book Review revealed their top 10 books of the year in a virtual event for subscribers. More best-of-the-year lists arrive. Comedian Rob Delaney’s new memoir, A Heart That Works , gets reviewed and buzz. SFWA Names Robin McKinley the 39th Damon Knight Grand Master. Colm Tóibín will be awarded the Bodley Medal in 2023. Ulrika O’Brien wins 2022 Rotsler Award. Bob Dylan’s autopen flap causes a stir.  NYT  features Tanya Holland’s California Soul: Recipes from a Culinary Journey West . Plus, Merriam-Webster chooses its 2022 word of the year.

Want to get the latest book news delivered to your inbox each day? Sign up for our daily Book Pulse newsletter.

Awards, news & best of the year lists.

review of books new york times

BookPage delivers the  Top 10 Books of 2022 . 

NYPL released its Best Books of 2022 list.

OprahDaily shares “Our Favorite Books of the Year.”

The Star Tribune shares 56 great books to give and receive for 2022 . 

SFWA Names Robin McKinley the 39th Damon Knight Grand Master .  Tor reports. 

Irish novelist Colm Tóibín will be awarded the Bodley Medal in 2023, and will give the 2023 Bodley Lecture during the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival.

Ulrika O’Brien wins 2022 Rotsler Award.   Locus has details. 

Essence  highlights the award ceremony for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winners .

For commentary on the Bob Dylan autopen flap, see coverage in  LA Times , USA Today , and  Vulture . Plus,  The Guardian considers: “do authors use autopen?”

review of books new york times

The Guardian reviews Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius by Nick Hornby (Riverhead): “Their creative force operated at a relentless, virtually industrial pace; Hornby’s tribute to their self-destructive genius is ardent but more than a little fearful.”

review of books new york times

Datebook reviews Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood by Jessica Grose (Mariner: Houghton Harcourt): “The picture the book paints of American motherhood stands in stark contrast to the gauzy, Instagram world of parenting bliss, which Grose argues is also making us miserable.”

Briefly Noted

review of books new york times

USA Today talks with Rob Delaney about writing his latest memoir , A Heart That Works (Spiegel & Grau), after the death of his son Henry. 

LA Times  talks with Robin Coste Lewis about her new poetry collection , To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness (Knopf).

Shondaland  chats with poet Mary-Alice Daniel about her new memoir , A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing: A Memoir Across Three Continents (Ecco), and “fallacies and power of borders.”

Publishers Lunch reports that Astra Publishing House is shutting down its literary journal , Astra Magazine after just two issues. 

review of books new york times

The New Yorker reflects on “The Year in Rereading.”

Lithub shares 8 new books for the week.

BookRiot highlights new releases .

The Millions has  notable new releases for the week . 

The Atlantic has 7 books to make you smarter.

CrimeReads recommends November’s best debuts . 

ElectricLit provides 7 genre-defying books by women of color.

Lithub shares a personalized booklist from n+1’s November bookmatch service.

Authors on Air

review of books new york times

PBS Canvas examines the significance of Merriam-Webster’s 2022 word of the year.   

Misty Copeland discusses her new book ,  The Wind at My Back: Resilience, Grace, and Other Gifts from My Mentor, Raven Wilkinson , written with Susan Fales-Hill (Grand Central), on Q with guest host Talia Schlanger. 

A live-action series adaptation of the Hugo Pratt Corto Maltese graphic novel series is in the works .  Deadline reports. 

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