The Watchlist: April 2025

What the publisher says: “For readers of Ling Ma and Sayaka Murata, Hon Lai Chu’s dystopian exploration of body autonomy, relationships, and late capitalism defies and then reassembles dark realities. . . . Mending Bodies blends body horror and political allegory to explore a world where even the motives of those you love most are shaped by larger forces.”

What Publishers Weekly says: “The unnamed narrator, an adrift student with worsening insomnia, is working on her dissertation about conjoined humans throughout history. She lives in a thinly veiled Hong Kong where the Conjoinment Act has incentivized citizens to surgically meld with another person.”

What I say: Mending Bodies begins in a relatively quotidian way; then the narrator uses the phrase “the man I was sewn to,” and all bets are off. This is a deeply visceral book—it has to be—but there’s no shortage of big ideas here, from attempts to reckon with loneliness to notions of governmental overreach. And the descriptions of the society depicted here include some unnerving details, such as “[c]onjoined people always get priority for jobs.” Throw in a powerful ending and you have a work of fiction that would make a great double bill with Brian Evenson’s Last Days.

What the publisher says: “Critically-acclaimed cartoonist Guy Delisle (Pyongyang, Hostage) returns with another engrossing foray into nonfiction: a biography about Eadweard Muybridge, the man who made pictures move. Despite career breakthrough after career breakthrough, Muybridge would only be hampered by betrayal, intrigue, and tragedy.”

What Phil Hoad at The Guardian says: “It’s a rollicking ride, told in Delisle’s typically light-footed style: Muybridge gatecrashes the early wet-plate photography boom in San Francisco, suffers a near fatal stagecoach accident, fuels America’s desire for epic visions of itself via his pioneering landscape photos, before murdering his wife’s lover (an incident depicted by Delisle in a motion-study-style sequence that’s arresting in every sense).”

What I say: Between his lasting influence and his murder trial, it isn’t hard to see why Eadweard Muybridge continues to fascinate contemporary writers. (See also: Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.) Guy Delisle’s biography gives an immersive sense of the ebbs and flows of Muybridge’s life. Some of the most bracing moments come when Delisle steps back and simply shows Muybridge’s original images, which retain plenty of power on their own.

What the publisher says: “Rabah’s poems can be raw and uninhibited by social or literary conventions, exploring and questioning one’s relationship to divinity in absurd circumstances while confronting the sacred cows of his own society, along with the sometimes voyeuristic interest from those on the outside of it.”

What I say: Poet Nasser Rabah knows how to create an evocative image, with stunning constructions like this: “We left our fingernails on the prison walls, growing in the dark like a cursed vine.” This collection begins by featuring some of Rabah’s shorter work, eventually segueing into lengthier poems; they reveal that he’s equally adept at making literary references (including to Mahmoud Darwish and Franz Kafka) and evoking the horrors of war. Also of note to Words Without Borders readers: one of these poems first appeared in translation right here.

What the publisher says: “An outspoken Israeli critic of his government’s treatment of the Palestinians, Aharon Shabtai is widely viewed as ‘one of the most exciting writers working in Hebrew today’ (Ha’aretz). Though some may feel that this is not the time for Israeli voices, others believe change must come from within as well as from pressures from outside Israel.”

What Susan Blumberg-Kason at Asian Review of Books says: “The book is centered around an epic poem set from the end of the British Mandate to the early years of the State of Israel. ‘Requiem,’ from which the book takes its title, reads almost like the Homeric poems Shabtai has translated from Greek to Hebrew.”

What I say: As one might expect from a writer late in his career, themes of aging and mortality run throughout Requiem. That title isn’t just about the frustrations of age, however; Shabtai also uses his poems to reckon with violence past and present. Late in the book, his pen turns to a slightly different task: recalling a particular space through verse, which he does with stark elegance.

What the publisher says: “From the author of the bestselling literary sensations Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings comes a surprising and highly imaginative story set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples has vanished and all children are born by artificial insemination.”

What B. D. McClay at The Wall Street Journal says: “Through her fiction, Ms. Murata has resolutely explored the strangeness of the cultural practices we otherwise consider ordinary. . . . [T]his story is set in an alternative reality, in which the ravages of World War II on Japan have led to a revolution in assisted reproduction.”

What I say: In the alternate timeline of Vanishing World, artificial insemination is the default way to reproduce, and the word “incest” has had its definition expanded to include sex between spouses. Characters fall in love with fictional characters, and science seems determined to perfect both bearing and raising children. It’s a heady book with an abundance of wit, including lines like “I’ve heard that falling in love is basically just entertainment for our lower bodies.” Certain sentences have an aphoristic quality: “Normality is the creepiest madness there is.”

What the publisher says: “On an obsessive journey through Europe, a woman drawn to the gravesites of her literary idols—Cesare Pavese, Italo Svevo, Franz Kafka—puts her life, her writing, and her politics in conversation with theirs.”

What Publishers Weekly says: “The narrator’s ruminations and memories of her earlier life in Turkey offer a view into ‘literature’s deep waters, churning with love and contradiction, pain, tears, and suicide.’ Though tedious in places, Özlü’s discursive narrative finds great clarity and beauty.”

What I say: “Haven’t my moments of greatest happiness carried sorrow in equal measure?” the narrator of Tezer Özlü’s book asks at one point; that paradox and sense of balance sustains this brief but memorable work. Written in the first half of the 1980s, it provides readers with a concise look at the European landscape, along with haunted reckonings with mortality and artistic influence.

Looking for more reading suggestions? Check out Tobias Carroll’s recommendations from last month.

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