SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN/VOELCKER AWARD FOR POETRY

What labor to live forever. Speak of the elect what can you do in all this world so much life in the little of it.

In four parts, Susan Howe’s new book opens with the arresting long prose poem “Penitential Cries,” followed by a group of word-collages “Sterling Park in the Dark,” “The Deserted Shelf,” and finally a brief sparrow poem. Speaking of her new work written in “the evening of life,” Howe quotes Thomas Wyatt: My galley, chargèd with forgetfulness, / thorough sharp seas in winter nights doth pass. She says: “I love those two lines. Between trespass and penitence. In the wilderness of the Book Stack Tower inquiry is trespass. Now at eighty-seven,” the poet adds, regarding Penitential Cries, “I want to express my pilgrim’s progress between rocks and paper places. The clock is ticking. It’s getting late. Supper is on the table. Our father lies full fifty fathoms five. A storm is coming.”

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024

A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2025

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE

Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November 18th repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: “That’s how little the activities of one person matter on the 18th of November.”)

Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her memories of the past light up inside the text like old-fashioned flash bulbs.

The first volume’s gravitational pull—a force inverse to its constriction—has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book’s logic (the thrilling shifts, the minute movements, the slant wit, the slowing of time), and its spell is utterly intoxicating.

Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens: “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.”

We would like to thank the Danish Arts Foundation for their generous support in the translation and publication of books I and II of On the Calculation of Volume.

Never before in English, Killing Stella is a gripping, razor-sharp novella about a fractured marriage by the ferociously talented author of The Wall.

Left alone for the weekend while her husband and two children are visiting her in-laws, Anna recounts the addition of her friend’s daughter, Stella, into their already tense and tumultuous household. Staring out the window at her garden, Anna worries about the baby bird in the linden tree, about her husband, Richard (who flits from one adultery to another), about her son’s gloomy demeanor and her daughter’s obliviousness, and most of all, about Stella, a confused teenager who will meet a sudden and disastrous end.

A domestic horror story that blossoms into a catastrophe, Marlen Haushofer's Killing Stella distills many of the themes of Marlen Haushofer’s acclaimed novel The Wall into a claustrophobic, gothic, shattering novella.

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025

Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize

Yoko Tawada's first essay collection in English presents an electrifying new side of the National Book Award-winner as she dives deep into her lifelong fascination with cross-hybridizing languages. The accent here, as in her fiction, is on the art of drawing closer to the world through defamiliarization. Tawada famously writes in both Japanese and German, but her interest in language reached beyond any mere dichotomy. The term "exophonic," which she first heard in Senegal, has a special allure for the author: "I was already familiar with similar terms. 'immigrant literature,' or 'creole literature,' but 'exophonic' had a much broader meaning, referring to the general experience of existing outside of one's mother tongue." Exophony opens a new vista into Yoko Tawada's world and delivers more of her signature erudite wit—at once cross-grained and generous, laser-focused and multidimensional, slyly ironic and warmly companionable.

While vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle-aged woman awakens one morning to find herself separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. With a cat, a dog, and a cow as her sole companions, she learns how to survive and cope with her loneliness.

Allegorical yet deeply personal and absorbing, The Wall is at once a critique of modern civilization, a nuanced and loving portrait of a relationship between a woman and her animals, a thrilling survival story, a Cold War-era dystopian adventure, and a truly singular feminist classic.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR THE GREG BARRIOS BOOK IN TRANSLATION

In seventeenth-century Denmark, Christenze Kruckow, an unmarried noblewoman, is accused of witchcraft. She and several other women are rumored to be possessed by the Devil, who has come to them in the form of a tall headless man and gives them dark powers: they can steal people’s happiness, they have performed unchristian acts, and they can cause pestilence or even death. They are all in danger of the stake.

The Wax Child, narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze Kruckow, is an unsettling horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of premodern Europe.

Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of real witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland in the seventeenth century. Full of lush storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn weaves in quotes from original sources such as letters, magical spells and manuals, court documents, and Scandinavian grimoires.

In the summer of 2020, a young Japanese academic based in the German city of Göttingen waits at the train station to meet her old friend Nomiya, who died nine years earlier in Japan's devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami but has now inexplicably returned from the dead. As soon as he arrives, she guides him through the city, showing him Göttingen's scale model of the solar system and talking about her PhD studies, her roommate, and their mutual friends. Yet it isn't long before his spectral presence in the city begins to fray the narrator's psyche and destabilize the world around them: eerie objects are found in the forest, the model of Pluto begins disappearing and reappearing, and threads in the fabric of time start unraveling. The narrative continues to spiral and unfold, with the presence of death ever lingering.

Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, The Place of Shells is a hypnotic, poetic novel that explores the ebb and flow of memory—its physical manifestations, its sudden detours—and the overwhelming stranglehold of trauma.

Taking place entirely on a single evening—Friday, April 10, 1970—in a large Bogotá mansion, House of Fury tells a hair-raising story. Nacho Caicedo, a magistrate of the Supreme Court of Justice, lives with his wife Alma and their six grown daughters. The Caicedos have planned an enormous celebration in their home. But before the party even starts, the family is shocked by two pieces of news: their teenage daughter Italia is pregnant, and Alma’s prodigal brother Jesús is expected at any moment. Guests from all levels of Bogotá society arrive, two earthquakes strike, and the party descends into debauchery, kidnap, and chaos. What begins as a black comedy unravels into a grim portent of the conflict that would rage across Colombia for fifty years. Like Rosero’s previous novels, House of Fury is an indelible, fantastical work that—with its unforgettable characters and unflinching, poetic, and humane voice—brings to light Colombia’s violent history.

We would like to thank Reading Colombia for their generous support in the translation and publication of House of Fury.

Spurning carnal desire and earthly temptations all his life, the mystic Othlo is now in the care of his brother monks, including the odious Wolkbart. Despite the spare walls which surround his sickbed, Othlo frolics with Holy Dionysius in the Garden of Head-bearers (each carries his own head for eternity), descends from the island of Heaven, visits a brothel patronized by fallen angels who spawn nightmarish offspring eternally, and witnesses the souls of the once gluttonous wealthy fighting over scraps of rotting crabmeat in a ditch in Hell. Accompanied by a sinister guide and a three-hoofed lamb, our hero sees things that make Hieronymsous Bosch’s hellscape look like a rose garden.

The third and final book in a series about mankind’s desire to conquer nature, Visions and Temptations follows Awake and Sublunar. In each novel, a great if imperfect mind faces the inevitable demise of the body.

It’s been a hot summer for a Swiss lakeside town—both bucolic and citylike, old-fashioned and up-to-date—when a “great message,” telegraphed from one continent to another, announces an “accident in the gravitational system." Something has gone wrong with the axis of the Earth that will send our planet plunging into the sun: it’s the end of the world, though one hardly notices it, yet ... “Thus all life will come to an end. The heat will rise. It will be excruciating for all living things … And yet nothing is visible for the moment.”

For now the surface of the lake is as calm as can be, and the wine har vest promises to be sweet. Most flowers, however, have died. The stars grow bigger, and the sun turns from orange-red to red, and then to black-red. First comes denial: “The news is from America, you know what that means.” Then come first farewells: counting and naming beloved things—the rectangular meadows, the grapes on the vines, the lake. In its beauty the world is saying, “Look at me,” before it ends.

The prophetic Into the Sun vividly voices the initial disbelief, the rejection of the increasingly obvious facts, and the suppression of the gnawing doubts. Ramuz describes denial, fear, melancholy, despair, reckless abandon, and a swift slide into anarchy. Everyone seeks relief in the lake while the sun drinks it up “as if through a straw.” Ramuz’s terrifyingly gripping scenario of a burning planet and the demise of humankind—now so fatefully on our horizon—is a stirring blast from the past, a truly hair-raising tour de force.

A kaleidoscopic novel by Julio Cortázar, A Certain Lucas contains a series of brilliant, eccentrically interlocking pieces, by turns comic, philosophical, allusive, and always a pleasure to read. In short takes, we are plunged directly into the life of Lucas, learning about his patriotism, his friends (“a list of cronies large and varied”), his shopping routines (always in his pajamas), his favorite pianists, his battles with the Hydra (“now that he’s growing old he realizes it’s not easy to kill it”). His world is described in multiple quick parodies, with hilarious evocations of the latest trends: physical fitness, semiotics, cool pornography, and animal ESP. We are given glimpses and ultimately offered a strange, yet rounded portrait of a complete man, but not just any man . . . This is a certain Lucas.