“One part Scheherazade, two parts Boccaccio, a twist of Bolaño, and a dash of bitters. Blue Label is intoxicating, hilarious, and the best novel on the calamity that is today’s Venezuela.”—Carmen Boullosa"This deftly and idiomatically translated novel . . . a quest of sorts, as a high school student in Chávez's Venezuela tries to make sense of love and life . . . packs a punch on many levels: personal, political, and even mythic." —Kirkus Revie...

A WORLD LITERATURE TODAY NOTABLE TRANSLATION OF 2022A sudden catastrophe in Europe exposes the slow-motion destruction of a generation of Venezuelans and their struggle against repression.The Lisbon Syndrome is the story of two catastrophes. A disaster annihilates a European capital, but few details filter through state media censorship in Caracas, home to many thousands of Portuguese.Fernando runs a theater progra...

Adulterers, cheats, hypocrites, bad seeds—in My Husband, Rumena Bužarovska turns her wry and razor-sharp gaze on men, and on the lives of the women who suffer them.In these eleven devastatingly precise and psychologically unsettling stories, we follow the female protagonists’ thwarted attempts at intimacy, ranging from pretense, to denial, to violent and ultimately self-destructive acts. This smart, funny, provocative collection demonstrates the profound s...

"A young woman scarred by love, betrayal and loss rebels against the social and patriarchal constraints of her rural community in search of a new life-only to discover that the past she left behind holds an unexpected second chance."In a Macedonian mountain village in the 1960s, Jana and Nikola meet by fate and fall in love. However, family expectations and betrayal conspire to tear them apart, forcing them to go their separate ways. Years later, while trying to rebuild her life, a...

Figures of Wood, the debut novel by Venezuelan writer María Pérez-Talavera, now translated into English, is a thought-provoking and gripping novel that delves into the mind of L, a young man questioning his own guilt and sanity in a sanatorium. Told in diary form, the story is set in an unnamed place and time, leaving the reader to question the reliability of L's entries as his perceptions seem to grow more distorted. The novel explores love and betrayal, shame and guilt, and the ...