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 Under the RadarNovember 2025 |
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Dealing with the Dead
by Alain Mabanckou
From one of Africa's greatest living writers, a ghostly reckoning with Congolese history
One day in the Congolese town of Pointe-Noire, Liwa Ekimakingaï wakes to find himself in a cemetery where, three days earlier, he had been buried at the age of twenty-two in a pair of flared purple trousers in which he is now trapped forever. All around him are the other residents of the cemetery, all of whom have their own complex stories of life and death to share.
Bewildered by his predicament and unwilling to relinquish his tender bond with his devoted grandmother, Liwa makes his way back home to see her one last time, against all spectral advice. As he does, disturbing rumors swirl together with Liwa's jumbled memories of his last night on earth, leading him to try and solve the mystery of his own untimely demise.
Sure to appeal to readers of George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo, Dealing with the Dead is an exuberant, phantasmagorical tale of ambition, community, and forces beyond human control, and a scathing satire on corruption and political violence by one of the most recognized chroniclers of modern Central Africa.
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Discontent
by Beatriz Serrano
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE - From a dazzling new international voice, an audacious, darkly funny novel about a young woman whose carefully crafted office persona threatens to crack when she's forced to attend her company's annual retreat A wry work of spectacular wit. . . . Beatriz Serrano writes with a caustic flare for detail, exploring the small humiliations of the everyday corporate office with charm and utter hilarity. Absolutely brilliant. --Danya Kukafka, author of Notes on an Execution On the surface, Marisa's life looks enviable. She lives in a beautiful apartment in the center of Madrid, she has a hot neighbor who is always around to sleep with her, and she's quickly risen through the ranks at a successful advertising agency. And yet she's drowning in a dark hole of existential dread induced by the banality of corporate life. Marisa hates her job and everyone at it. She spends her working hours locked in her office hiding from her coworkers, bingeing YouTube videos, and getting high on tranquilizers. When she has the time, she escapes to her favorite museum where she contemplates the meaning of life while staring at Hieronymus Bosch paintings, or trying to get hit by a car so she can go on disability. But Marisa's dubious success, which is largely built on lies and work she's stolen from other people, is in danger of being exposed when she's forced to go on her company's team-building retreat. Isolated in the Segovia forests, haunted by the deeply buried memory of a former coworker, and surrounded by psychopathic bosses, overzealous coworkers, flirty retreat staff, and an excess of drugs, Marisa finds herself acting on her wildest impulses and is pushed to the brink of a complete spiral.
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Dominion
by Addie E. Citchens
A novel with a big cast, Dominion explores the lies and complicity of a Baptist church and the family that leads it: a philandering minister, a pill-popping first lady, and a favorite son whose fall will expose them all--
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Good and Evil and Other Stories
by Samanta Schweblin
Sculpted and lucid, strange and uncanny, here is a masterpiece of suggestiveness. Step by step these seven stories lure us into the shadows to confront the monsters of everyday life - ourselves. Guilt, grief, and relationships severed permeate this collection - but so do unspeakable bonds of family, love, and longing, each sinister and beautiful. When something seismic happens in our lives, the waves keep coming for years after, with warning or without. Sometimes, all we can do is wait around the corner, ear pressed to the phone receiver, for them to arrive. Fantastical and subtly terrifying, these stories draw on magical realism, psychological fiction, and the dark side of fairy tales, inherited from literary predecessors like the Brothers Grimm and Jorge Luis Borges. Yet, far from antiquated or closed off, Schweblin's worlds invite us in, like quicksand or a strong river's current. These stories will insinuate themselves into your heart, and your bloodstream--
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Little Movements
by Lauren Morrow
Thirty-something Layla Smart was raised by her mother to dream medium. But all Layla's ever wanted was a career in dance, which requires dreaming big. So when she receives an offer to be the choreographer-in-residence at Briar House in rural Vermont, she temporarily leaves behind Brooklyn, her job, her friends, and her husband to pursue it. Layla has nine months to navigate a complex institution and teach a career-defining dance to a group of Black dancers in a very small, very white town. She has help from a handsome composer, a neurotic costume designer, a witty communications director, and the austere program director who can only compare Layla to Black choreographers. It's an enormous feat, and that's before Layla's marriage buckles under the strain of distance, before Briar House's problematic past comes to light, and before Layla finds out she's pregnant. 'Little movements' is a poignant and insightful story that explores issues of race, class, art, and ambition. It is a novel about self-discovery, the pressures placed on certain bodies, and never giving up on your dream--
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Midnight Timetable: A Novel in Ghost Stories
by Bora Chung
The acclaimed Korean horror and sci-fi writer's goosebump-inducing new book follows an employee on the night shift at the Institute. They soon learn why some employees don't last long at the center. The handkerchief in Room 302 once belonged to the late mother of two sons, whose rivalry imbues the handkerchief with undue power and unravels the lives of those who seek to possess it. Meanwhile a live-streaming, ghost-chasing employee steals a cursed sneaker down the hall, but later finds he can't escape its tread. The cat in Room 206 begins to reveal the crimes of its former family, wanting to understand its own path to the Institute's dimly lit halls. But Chung's haunted institute isn't just a chilling place to play. As in her astounding collections Cursed bunny and Your utopia, these violent allegories subtly excavate the horrors of animal cosmetic testing, 'conversion therapy,' domestic abuse, and late-stage capitalism. Equal parts bone-chilling, wryly funny, and deeply political, Midnight timetable is a masterful work of literary horror from one of our time's greatest imaginations
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These Memories Do Not Belong to Us: A Constellation Novel
by Yiming Ma
Decades from now, the world is run by an authoritarian state called Qin. In Qin, every citizen is fitted with a Mindbank, an intracranial device capable of not only recording but transferring memories between minds. The technology gives birth to a new economy, referred to as Memory Capitalism, where anyone with means can relive the life experiences of others. It also unleashes opportunities for manipulation-memories can be edited, marketed, and even corrupted for personal gain. When a man inherits his deceased mother's Mindbank--a collection of memories from before, during, and after the global war that landed Qin atop the international food chain--he's unsure what he'll find inside, or whether the Party has gotten to her memories first, altering the experiences she left for him. Either way, he is adamant that he must share them with the world before they are destroyed forever, even if the cost of doing so is his own life--Provided by publisher.
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The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
by Rabih Alameddine
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDAlameddine is a writer with a boundless imagination.--NPRFrom National Book Award finalist and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction comes a tragicomic love story set in Lebanon, a modern saga of family, memory, and the unbreakable attachment of a son and his motherIn a tiny Beirut apartment, sixty-three-year-old Raja and his mother live side by side. A beloved high school philosophy teacher and the neighborhood homosexual, Raja relishes books, meditative walks, order, and solitude. Zalfa, his octogenarian mother, views her son's desire for privacy as a personal affront. She demands to know every detail of Raja's work life and love life, boundaries be damned.When Raja receives an invite to an all-expenses-paid writing residency in America, the timing couldn't be better. It arrives on the heels of a series of personal and national disasters that have left Raja longing for peace and quiet away from his mother and the heartache of Lebanon. But what at first seems a stroke of good fortune soon leads Raja to recount and relive the very disasters and past betrayals he wishes to forget.Told in Raja's irresistible and wickedly funny voice, the novel dances across six decades to tell the unforgettable story of a singular life and its absurdities--a tale of mistakes, self-discovery, trauma, and maybe even forgiveness. Above all, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is a wildly unique and sparkling celebration of love.
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The Woman Dies
by Aoko Matsuda
Tales from Japan that blend humor, surrealism, and sharp societal critique, by the acclaimed author of Where the Wild Ladies ArePiercing and sometimes surreal... Matsuda shines.--Publishers WeeklyIn The Woman Dies, renowned author Aoko Matsuda approaches often-thorny subjects such as sexism, prejudice, the normalizing effect of violence against women on screen, or the aesthetics associated with technology, with an inventiveness and quirky humor that keep these stories on the thrilling cusp between seriousness and levity.Wordplay evolves into something much more complex, inanimate objects are endowed with their own point of view, and hard-hitting feminist stances are conveyed with a dry, detached humor that makes them even more undeniable.Not so much a rollercoaster ride, rather an entire theme park, The Woman Dies is an out-of-the ordinary space readers will step into with feelings of wonder and discombobulation in equal parts.
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Women, Seated
by Zhang Yueran
A novel about the unraveling lives of a nanny and the family she works for following the downfall of its patriarch, a prominent Chinese politician--
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