Pedro the Vast by Simón López Trujillo, translated from the Spanish (Chile) by Robin Myers (Algonquin Books, January 13)

In the disorienting, devastatingly tense world of López Trujillo, a eucalyptus farm worker named Pedro starts coughing. Several of his coworkers die of a strange fungal disease, which has jumped to humans for the first time, but Pedro, miraculously, awakes. His survival fascinates a foreign mycologist, as well as a local priest, who dubs his mysterious mutterings to be the words of a prophet. Meanwhile Pedro’s kids are left to fend for themselves: the young Cata, whose creepy art projects are getting harder and harder to decipher, and Patricio, who wasn’t ready to be thrust into the role of father. Their competing efforts to reckon with Pedro’s condition eventually meet in a horrifying climax that readers will never forget.

The Luminous Fairies and Mothra by Takehiko Fukunaga, Yoshie Hotta and Shin’ichiro Nakamura, translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles (University of Minnesota Press, January 13)

Mystical and benevolent, the colossal lepidopteran Mothra has been one of the most beloved kaiju since 1961, when The Luminous Fairies and Mothra was originally published in Japanese. Commissioned by Tōhō Studios from three of Japan’s most prominent postwar literary writers (Shin’ichirō Nakamura, Takehiko Fukunaga, and Yoshie Hotta), the novella formed the basis for the now-classic monster film Mothra, with a protagonist second only to Godzilla in number of film appearances by a kaiju. Finally available in its first official English translation, The Luminous Fairies and Mothra will captivate ardent, longtime fans of the films as well as newcomers.

Scorpions by Yumiko Kurahashi, translated from the Japanese by Michael Day (Wakefield Press, January 20)

Yumiko Kurahashi’s 1968 novella Scorpions takes the form of a transcript of a one-sided interview with L following the arrest and institutionalization of her twin brother K. The two have played a role in a series of horrifying deaths culminating in the murder of their mother. Through a first-person narrative that varies in tone from scientifically clinical to darkly humorous, mingling together references to the Bible and Greek mythology, odd bits of dialogue, and obtuse descriptions, we learn of K and L’s shocking crimes, the gruesome plight of their religion-obsessed mother, and the professional and personal entanglement of L and an older man they call the RED PIG, their mother’s former lover.

With the Heart of a Ghost by Lim Sunwoo, translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim (Unnamed Press, February 10)

With the Heart of a Ghost is a debut collection of eight fantastical stories translated by Chi-Young Kim that explore feelings unseen, unconveyed, unexplainable….A ghost who looks just like the narrator reflects her feelings back to her in a bun shop; mutant jellyfish take over the world and if you touch one you become one yourself; a heartbroken man becomes a tree in his ex’s apartment; the ghost of a wannabe K-pop star stuck in a vacuum cleaner wants out; Jugyeong helps a man hibernate by burying him up to his neck; Huiae, in deep conflict with her husband, reconnects with her strange old friend; Jo has lost his best friend–a gecko–but won’t give up the search; and Suyeong plots revenge on a wild dog that killed her cats by channeling her inner cat.

Revolver Christi by Anna Albinus, translated from the German by Rachel Farmer (Dedalus Books, February 13)

No one knows the exact origins of the enigmatic Revolver Christi, a holy relic with a sinister past. When the revolver is implicated in a mysterious crime, Thomas finds himself drawn into an ever-tightening web of intrigue. A piano teacher, a photograph in the attic, an underground sect, an unexplained illness—with each thread he pulls, Thomas inches closer to unravelling the truth. But those elusive answers he craves may lie unnervingly close to home. Subtle, subversive, and filled with a creeping sense of dread—this genre-bending novella is a bold exploration of religion, superstition and human nature.

Strange Buildings by Uketsu, translated from the Japanese by Jim Rion (Pushkin Press, February 26)

Eleven strange buildings. One terrible secret. A lonely hut in the woods. A hidden chamber. A mysterious shrine. A home in flames. A nightmarish prison… Each of the buildings in this book tells a chilling story. Each one is part of a puzzle. Look closely… and you’ll see that everything is connected. All leading to a revelation so horrifying you won’t want to believe it. Millions of readers have become addicted to solving Uketsu’s dark mysteries. Strange Buildings is the strangest, and darkest, so far.

City Like Water by Dorothy Tse, translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce (Graywolf Press, March 3)

Your city is gone, as if sunk to the bottom of the ocean. So much has vanished with it—counterfeit watches, streets echoing with the sound of stilettos, and even some of your classmates and teachers. Your mother joins in a housewives’ protest, each woman waving the fake, bloody lotus roots they were sold until they’re turned into statues. Then it’s just you and your father at home. But soon he is absorbed into the enormous TV gifted by the government, and you can only see him in the background of soap operas. And didn’t you once have a little sister? When the police go undercover and transform your neighborhood into a violent labyrinth, where does it all leave you? Lucid, nightmarish, and indelible, City Like Water is a wondrous tale of a city not so different from your own.

Cabaret in Flames by Hache Pueyo, translated from the Portuguese (Brazil) by the author (Tordotcom, March 10)

Hache Pueyo returns after But Not Too Bold with her new novella Cabaret in Flames, where Interview with the Vampire meets Certain Dark Things in an alternate-Brazil where brutal flesh-hungering Guls stalk the night streets and manipulate the government from their glittering cabaret.

I Was Alive Here Once: Ghost Stories (anthology) (Two Lines Press, March 10)

Through eight contemporary stories exploring a range of genres, from fantasy and horror to eco-fiction and romance, this collection breathes new life into the ghost story, foregoing familiar tropes to speak to today’s unique political and ecological horrors. Both lighthearted and menacing, I Was Alive Here Once will lead you into the haze where the living and the dead meet.

The Monroe Girls by Antoine Volodine, translated from the French by Alyson Waters (Archipelago Books, March 17)

Breton has seen brighter days. Now his body sags as he pulls a pair of binoculars to his withered face. He peers from the grimy window of a near-empty psychiatric compound—one of the last buildings standing after an unspecified disaster—spying rue Dellwo below, dreary in perpetual rain. Into this world of devastation drop the Monroe girls—paramilitaries trained in the “dark place” by Monroe, a dissident executed long ago. Their mission to revamp the Party is futile in this bleak, decaying world. Breton, our schizophrenic narrator, is tasked (and tortured) by what remains of the Party to locate and identify the Monroe girls using special optical equipment and his powers of extrasensory perception. Breton’s journey through a bardo-like, hostile labyrinth invites us into a sensual swirl of bodily decay, political acquiescence, and civilizational collapse. In this derelict setting, Volodine ruminates on identity, surveillance, life after death, and love (which, alas, does not conquer all). An urgent and blistering tale, beautifully rendered with Volodine’s distinct pathos and humor.

Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime by Reza Ghassemi,
translated from the Persian by Michelle Quay (Deep Vellum, March 17)

Suspenseful, yet darkly humorous, Woodwind Harmony In The Nighttime explores the trauma of displacement, and challenges readers to piece together the story of a life shattered by exile.

The Raven of Ruwi and Other Stories from Oman by Hamoud Saud, translated from the Arabic by Zia Ahmed (Syracuse University Press, March 18)

In this lyrical collection, author Hamoud Saud invites readers into the soul of Oman, a country famed for its long coastline, rugged mountains, and stark desert landscapes. This geography provides the backdrop for stories that reveal both the beauty and hardship of a country and people on the margins. Focused on the capital city, Saud’s Muscat is not a postcard-perfect city but a living, breathing place of cement forests, forgotten roundabouts, and ravens perched on flagpoles. Each story is fabulist in spirit but grounded in the textures of everyday life….

This’ll Make Things a Little Easier by Attila Veres, translated from the Hungarian by the author (Valancourt Books, March 24)

In the opening story, ‘a pit full of teeth’, an aspiring Hungarian horror writer gets the exciting news that one of his stories will be translated into the obscure language of a reclusive tribe that almost no one knows anything about. But when his copy of the translation arrives, he discovers that it doesn’t match what he wrote: instead, the text contains a much more horrific narrative that seems to be playing out in reality. In ‘The Designated Contact Individual’, a traveling representative for a soft drink company finds his sales territory expanding when he is sent to an alternate reality where they have their own nightmarish use for his cola. ‘Damage d10+7’ tells of a group of gamers who commit a terrible outrage in the fantasy world of their game and which has a deadly ripple effect in their real lives. The narrator in ‘The Summer I Chose to Die’ has decided that life is no longer worth living, but his worldview is shaken up when a murderous army of fish-people begins to rise from the oceans. And in the title story, money literally does grow on trees when the Hungarian government tries to alleviate poverty by supplying families with a strange new plant species, but their newfound financial gain will come at a terrible cost.

City of Rats by Copi, translated from French by Kit Schluter (New Directions, March 31)

Told in a series of letters purportedly written in rat language and posted from Gouri to his former master, City of Rats is the second novel by French-Argentine exile, novelist, cartoonist, playwright, actor, and queer provocateur Copi to be translated into English and perhaps his most madcap work, an X-rated fable with high-velocity prose that smashes through societal taboos— moral, sexual, or otherwise—like a bullet train hitting a glass house.

Event Horizon by Balsam Karam, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel (The Feminist Press, March 31)

From the author of The Singularity, a saga of one girl’s resistance and exile in the stars and soil of galactic empire.

The Witch by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French (France) by Jordan Stump (Vintage, April 7)

Equal parts dreamlike and disquieting, The Witch tells a tale as old as time, with a dark twist: Without looking back, children fly the nest, laying bare the tenuous threads of family that have long threatened to snap. With simmering tension and increasing panic, NDiaye’s latest novel in English captures the terror and precarity of motherhood and marriage, and the uncertainty of slowly realizing that your progeny are more dangerous—to the world and to your heart—and freer than you ever could have dreamed.

On the Calculation of Volume (Book IV) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (New Directions, April 14)

We’re a little more than halfway through Balle’s hypnotic, monumental seven-volume novel about a woman set adrift within the walls of November 18th…In Book III we saw the addition of a handful of new characters to Tara’s world—fellow travelers within November 18th—and now Book IV heralds the arrival of many others, and soon to be even more, roaming uncertainly through the same November day. Could this be the first stirrings of an alternate civilization? The big house in Bremen turns into the headquarters for this growing group of time-trapped individuals. But who are they and what has happened to them? Are they loopers, repeaters, or returners? A brilliant modern spin on the myth of Babel, Book IV asks urgent questions, concerning the naming of things, and people, and of the functions of language itself–must a social movement have a common language in order to exist?…Amid the buzz and excitement of a new social order coming into being, Book IV ends with a sudden, unexpected, and tantalizing cliffhanger that no one—not even Tara, our steady cataloger and cartographer of the endless November day—could have foreseen.

If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light by Kim Choyeop, translated from the Korean by Anton Hur (S&S/Saga Press, April 28)

From Korean science fiction author Kim Cho-yeop, a stunning and poignant collection of literary speculative fiction stories that explore the complexities of identity, love, death, and the search for life’s meaning, perfect for fans of Exhalation and The Paper Menagerie.

Not Yet Gods by Djuna, translated from the Korean by Gord Sellar and Jihyun Park (Kaya Press, April 28)

Following the landmark English-language publication of Everything Good Dies Here, Kaya Press delivers more provocative thought experiments by pseudonymous author Djuna, whose writings on internet culture have attracted a cult following in South Korea. Not Yet Gods explores the universe-shattering effects of teenage anger cross-pollinated with radiation-induced psychic powers, unscrupulous governments and corporate avarice.

The Heart of the Nhaga by Lee Young-do, translated from the Korean by Anton Hur (Harper Voyager, April 28)

Welcome to Lee Young-do’s epic classic series, The Bird That Drinks Tears. The master of Korean fantasy—often cited as the J.R.R. Tolkien of South Korea—Lee Young-do has created a tale of castles built on the backs of flying mantas, giant birdmen, heartless immortals, and a quest that will change the very nature of the world and its gods, available for the first time in English by award-winning translator Anton Hur.

Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun by Mónica Ojeda, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker (Coffee House Press, May 12)

In the near future, best friends Noa and Nicole flee their home in Guayaquil, Ecuador to attend the Solar Noise Festival, a week-long, retro-futuristic gathering at the foot of an active volcano. While Noa fully embraces the haze of narcotics and hedonism in an effort to obscure her true reason for attending, Nicole senses something darker at play behind the festival’s so-called “celebration of life.” Amid technoshamanic poetry, collective hallucinations, and ritualistic dances, each girl navigates her own path in an effort to escape her past and reclaim her right to a future.

Dead Weight by Hildur Knútsdóttir, translated from the Icelandic by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor Nightfire, May 26)

Unnur was living a normal, if lonely, life until a black cat showed up at her door. Trying to do the right thing, Unnur reunites the lost pet with its owner—a young woman named Ásta who is in desperate need of some help. Unnur reluctantly agrees to take in the cat until Ásta is able to care for it again herself. Soon, Ásta becomes a fixture in Unnur’s life and the two form an unlikely friendship. But like a black cat, trouble is tailing Ásta, and Unnur is the only one there when things take a violent turn. Nothing tests a friendship like blood on your hands.

Visions & Apparitions: Selected Tales of the Uncanny by Ladislav Klíma, translated from the Czech by Jed Slast (Twisted Spoon Press, June 1)

Collected here for the first time in English, Visions & Apparitions represents the greater part of Klíma’s output of ghost stories. Klíma employed the horror genre as a way to explore his subjectivist philosophy, and by all accounts he enjoyed writing them to pass the time. At times playful and lyrical, if not outright comical, the stories were written at various stages, the last text, ostensibly a one-act play about the undead, penned (or dictated) in the final months of his life. Taken together, they reflect Klíma’s lifelong preoccupation with the nature of “reality” as a matrix of madness, hallucination, and dream permeated with all-to-real phantoms and ghouls. Akin to Poe, ghosts emerge from the unconscious or the power of imagination and materialize as more than mere figment, visible even to others.

The Last Canterbury Tales by Jean Ray, translated from the French (Belgium) by Scott Nicolay (Wakefield Press, June 2)

Drawing on the lineage of British Gothic fiction, German Romanticism, and—with such character names as Mistress Squeak, Dick Wallet, Teddy Ruddle, and old Mr. Pankeydrop—Dickensian humor, Ray spins a series of tales that embody his own distinct mixture of weird Catholic mythology and cosmic horror. The Last Canterbury Tales, first published in French in 1944, makes no pretense of finishing Chaucer’s masterpiece but instead works toward a denouement of its own that reveals an unexpected act of storytelling underpinning this collection.

The Drowned Land by Paul Willems, tr from the French (Belgium) by Edward Gauvin (Wakefield Press, June 16)

The city of Aquelon is sheltered by moored lightsails, ensconced in a calm and misty land where the division between water and sky has dissipated. Its people are happy, living an ecstasy of subtle frissons, free of jealousy and any ties to affection. The Emperor of Aquelon has signed a final law repealing all past and future laws and has cast his crown upon the waters. It is the era of the ineffable, without distinction between life and death, and in which the lure of water leads even children to live and die as flowers, drowning themselves with smiles to drift down the estuary to a shoreless horizon of eternity. A traveler arrives to this idyllic paradise, speaking of Rome’s marble palaces and monuments—the land of Virgil with laws carved into stone. And Aquelon’s reign of dream begins to come apart under the destructive force of desire and the violence of nothingness as rituals are broken and nights are consumed by shrieks of horror.

Animal Spiral by Luis Othoniel Rosa, translated from the Spanish (Puerto Rico) by Katie Marya (Charco Press, June 23)

The post-colonial birth, life, and death of the collective consciousness known as the Animal. Middle-aged streamer twins in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, are the first human beings to successfully connect—sharing their consciousness across 34 translucent cables. In that moment, the Animal is born, an intracerebral force that quickly grows to encompass anthills of synaptically entwined bodies, a floating library kitchen redolent of rice and beans far above the Mississippi river, and a transhuman compound in a future Cuba on the Isle of Youth. 

From the Earth to the Moon: Annotated for Our Spacefaring Age by Jules Verne, edited by Anastasia Klimchynskaya, translated from the French by Walter James Miller (MIT Press, June 30)

A new, annotated edition of Jules Verne’s classic, which considers the past, present, and future of spaceflight from scientific as well as humanistic angles. In an age when the idea of a “planet B” seems tempting, this edition of Verne’s classic From the Earth to the Moon (1865) offers a complete and unabridged translation into English alongside extensive annotations and essays from contributors that span disciplines. It uses the prescient novel as a launching pad to consider the past, present, and future of spaceflight from scientific, humanistic, social, legal, and ethical angles.

The Mulai by Munir Hachemi, translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches (Coach House Books, August 11)

Interstellar via Invisible Cities: spec-fic translated from Spanish imagines life on another planet….Drawing on Borges, Le Guin, and Calvino, The Mulai is a mind-bending work of metafiction whose interlocking puzzles resound with Munir Hachemi’s singularly playful and eclectic style.

A Plagued Sea by Kim Bo-Young, translated from the Korean by Sophie Bowman (Tor Nightfire, August 11)

While waiting for a train to Haewon, an isolated Korean seaside village, bodyguard Mu-young gets a disaster alert on her phone. TVs throughout the station report breaking news of a massive earthquake on the eastern coast. Despite the danger, Mu-young boards the train with her niece: she’d rather face the earthquake than leave the girl in her mother’s care. That choice haunts her for the rest of her life. Three years later, Haewon Village is home to horrors. The earthquake unleashed an ancient plague that transforms its victims into fishy monsters, and the government’s lockdown has cut off any hope for help. Mu-young’s niece is dead, and all that’s left for her is to hunt villagers who break isolation. When an officious bureaucrat from Seoul arrives in the village, he stirs up even deeper trouble. Will Mu-young survive? Does she even deserve to?

Slow Elephants of Milan by Ángel Bonomini, translated from the Spanish (Argentina) by Jordan Landsman (Transit Books, August 11)

In twelve short fictions threaded together by an insatiable curiosity about time, memory, art, and the divine, Ángel Bonomini (The Novices of Lerna) explores “the sweet and subtle interrelations of things.” Originally published in 1978 and appearing in English for the first time, Slow Elephants of Milan is an indispensable addition to our literature of the strange and fantastic.

Pan by Francesco Dimitri, translated from the Italian by by Sophia McDougall (Tor Books, October 13)

Jim Butcher meets Claire North in this brutal modern Italian retelling of the story of Peter Pan, now in English for the first time.

Paradise Burns by Pol Guasch, translated from the Catalan (Spain) by Mara Faye Lethem (FSG, October 20)

When Rita and Líton meet at a party, they quickly form a bond that will indelibly shape their lives. Theirs is not an easy world: most wildlife is extinct and the earth is tormented by drought and floods; the last vestiges of natural life are kept under lock and key in a mysterious greenhouse a day’s travel away. Like the other young men of the Service, Líton is frequently enlisted to put out the seemingly never-ending fires that tear through the valley; Rita lives perched on a hill in the Colony, where other men, including her father, empty an almost barren mine. Yet their bond grounds them. They navigate the love affairs, setbacks, and thwarted idealism of their twenties together, finding in each other a vital reprieve for their disillusionment—that is, until Líton, like other gay men, falls deathly sick.

Blood to the True Crown by Sung-il Kim, translated from the Korean by Anton Hur (Tor Books, November 17)

The fate of the world will be decided in Blood to the True Crown, the epic conclusion to the Bleeding Empire trilogy, from award-winning Korean author Sung-il Kim and translated by the world-renowned Anton Hur.