“Tomorrow’s Beautiful Dream” by Ju Chu, translated from the Chinese by Carmen Yiling Yan (Clarkesworld, January 1)

“All My Birds“ by K.A. Teryna, translated from the Russian by Alex Shvartsman (Asimov’s, January/February)

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.

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.