Also of interest...new works in translation

Greek Lessons by Han Kang (Hogarth, $26)

“In Greek Lessons, Han Kang reaches beyond the usual senses to translate the unspeakable,” said Michele Filgate in the Los Angeles Times. Her fourth novel translated from Korean tells the story of two people—one a student going mute, the other a teacher going blind— who find comfort in studying ancient Greek. By exploring how a dead language strengthens these characters, the author of The Vegetarian “turns the well-worn idea of the mind-body disconnect into something fresh and substantial.”

This Is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor (New Directions, $16)

Veracruz, Mexico’s largest port city, “swelters in vigilantism and narcoterrorism,” said William T. Vollmann in The New York Times. Before Fernanda Melchor wrote the two novels that won her fame, she produced this collection of grim stories about her native city, all based on interviews. Not every detail is true: Her witnesses speak of ghosts as well as rapes and murders. But the horror is gripping and, “in addition to bravely presenting dark truths, Melchor writes from a good heart.”

Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki (Verso, $20)

In Izumi Suzuki’s fiction, “the novelty is not always so much in the ideas as in the consistently engaging execution,” said Dexter Palmer in The Washington Post. The Japanese writer, who died at 36 in 1986, had a “distinctly misanthropic voice” that enlivens this collection of stories mostly focused on women whose lives are altered, “sometimes humorously, sometimes catastrophically,” by supernatural or extraterrestrial forces. The men here are awful, and even Suzuki’s breeziest tales “sting a little.”

Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux (Yale, $16)

Annie Ernaux might make you think differently about your next supermarket trip, said Apoorva Tadepalli in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The recent Nobel laureate assembled journal entries she made during a year’s worth of regular visits to a superstore in a Paris suburb. “Such a store is both alienating and inviting, oppressive and inspiring,” and Ernaux helps us see all of it. Observing herself and her fellow food shoppers, she’s “someone watching modernity unfold in real time.”