When masked agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement invaded Minneapolis earlier this year, I couldn’t help thinking about the incredible work being done by the literary presses headquartered there. Along with many others, Coffee House, Graywolf, and Milkweed in particular are known for publishing fiction that would give an ICE agent a stroke: International in outlook, open to voices beyond the mainstream, they’ve recently released books by immigrants such as Agri Ismaïl, a Kurdish author based in Sweden, and Cristina Rivera Garza, the Mexican director of the Ph.D. program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.
In a recent column, I mentioned Milkweed’s poignant The Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian; trans. by Bruce Humes (Jan. 13), set among the Evenki—an Indigenous group that spans parts of China and Russia. The 90-year-old narrator looks back on a life that includes the Japanese army invading China and loggers chopping down the forest where she lives. Our review calls it “often unbearably sad, but beautifully told,” and it feels more relevant by the day. If you’d like to support Minneapolis publishers, here are some more great novels that have come out recently:
False War by Carlos Manuel Álvarez; trans. by Natasha Wimmer (Graywolf, 2025): This book about Cubans and Cuban refugees is billed as a novel, though our review says “it more closely resembles a linked-story collection where each piece is shattered and reshuffled.” Sometimes we’re in Miami, sometimes Havana; we even take a trip to the Louvre. An author tries to write a novel called False War. “The deliberate lack of footholds is part of the point,” according to our review. Álvarez “wants to emphasize the individuality of his characters’ journeys and blunt any reader’s attempts to reduce them to types.”
Hyper by Agri Ismaïl (Coffee House, Jan. 13): The Kermanj family fled from Kurdistan to Iran and then to London just before the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The daughter, Siver, moves to Dubai when her husband says he wants to take a second wife. One son works in finance in London and another in New York, making lots of money but spending way too much time online. “Ismaïl brilliantly changes tone between each section of the novel,” according to our starred review. “Siver’s story is told with aching wistfulness, while Mohammed’s is marked with an arch sense of humor.…Laika’s story, meanwhile, is a claustrophobic catalogue of his days spent on social media.…the emptiness of his days is heartbreakingly sad. This is a searing, nearly flawless novel.”
Autobiography of Cotton by Cristina Rivera Garza; trans. by Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf, Feb. 3): Rivera Garza blends biography, history, fiction, ecological criticism, and memoir as she investigates the history of a 1934 cotton workers’ strike on the Mexico-U.S. border and tries to discover her own grandparents’ role in it—and the way her grandparents’ journey intersected with that of José Revueltas, a writer and activist who published a novel about the strike in 1943. “Rivera Garza beautifully asks vital questions about whose stories get to be preserved.…this is undeniably a major accomplishment,” according to our starred review.
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
