“Three Cases from the Cosmic Psychiatric Clinic” by Pan Haitian, translated from the Chinese by Blake Stone-Banks (Clarkesworld, June 1)

The Heart of the Nhaga by Lee Young-do, translated from the Korean by Anton Hur (Harper Voyager, June 2)

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.

Home in the Dark by Jayanta Dey, translated from the Bengali by Sayari Debnath (University of Chicago Press, June 5)

When civility is just a mask, what happens when it slips? This collection of gripping stories pries open the cracks in urban life, revealing the chaos and cruelty beneath. Home in the Dark peels back the polished surface of middle-class life to expose the shadows lurking underneath: violence, betrayal, and the unsettling truths we refuse to see. In these fifteen gripping stories, Jayanta Dey weaves a world where desperation takes strange forms: a woman on the brink of suicide finds an unlikely savior in a rat, a stolen clock carries the weight of communal hatred, and a writer–publisher duo rides the highs of literary success—until their lucrative business in pornography turns against them.

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.