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.

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.

I Was Alive Here Once: Ghost Stories (anthology) (Two Lines Press, March 1)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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.