Full Stop

[Cardboard House Press; 2026] Tr. from the Spanish by Judah Rubin In May 2005, forty-four Chilean army conscripts were ordered to march twenty-four kilometers through a whiteout storm in inadequate gear for a training exercise, and on the slopes of the Antuco volcano, died of hypothermia.

[Nightboat Books; 2026] Consider life as a series of iterations. You might fear these past versions of yourself, but they are there. They float back to the surface in sensations, smells, places. If you write about them, they are preserved, opulent but unnerving. “A sequence of past selves lined up each next to a river of identifications,” writes Yongyu Chen.

[Fonograf Editions; 2026] Can a story be a theft? Kristen Gleason’s debut short story collection, The Wallet and Other Thefts, foregrounds the form of the story from its title page, altering the conventional “and Other Stories” with a word insinuating an affinity between narrative and disappearance, crookedness, ill-gotten gains.

This essay was first published last month in our subscriber-only newsletter. To receive the monthly newsletter and to support Full Stop’s original literary criticism, please consider joining us on Patreon. Olivia Kan-Sperling’s Little Pink Book (Archway Editions, 2025) was originally conceived as a companion piece for video-artist Diane Severin Nguyen’s fake documentary In Her Time, which follows an actress as she takes on her first leading role in a film about the Rape of Nanking.

[University of Nebraska Press; 2026] Some people hold a certain kind of elitist reverence for literature, as if books were sacred, set apart, and existed in a rarefied realm untarnished by economics. Such people would be horrified by Ford, a consummate capitalist who sees books as products and believes that value is conferred by consumer taste, rather than some esoteric aesthetic or moral sensibility.

Tr. from the Bengali by Asit Biswas [Tilted Axis Press; 2026] The brief novella Andhar Bil by the Dalit feminist poet Kalyani Thakur Charal begins with departure and arrival. A group of mostly Namasudra refugees leaves East Pakistan (current-day Bangladesh) after Partition and settles in India near Andhar Bil, a waterbody similar to those in their native land. The refugees are members of the Matua sect of Hinduism, which has a social-justice bent and strives for equality between castes.

[New York Review of Books; 2026] Recently reissued, Robert Coover’s novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., breaks down the myths of the “Great American Pastime.” The book follows J. Henry Waugh, a sadsack accountant whose life’s greatest joy is his minutely curated fictional baseball association.

Tr. from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega [Yale University Press; 2025] Hafez, who lived in Shiraz in the fourteenth century, is considered one of the greatest classical Persian poets. But before he became Hafez, his name was Shamssuddin, and he worked as a delivery boy for a bakery. One day, Shamssuddin’s master sends him to deliver a basket of pastries to a girl who lives in the wealthy district.

Prairie Ashes tells the story of the 1930s Illinois Mine War from the perspective of its narrator, Barb Massacre, in 1986. For me the intervening years–as well as the years since–are full of important things suggested by the novel. It’s just the sort of book that makes you want to ask the author a bunch of questions. So I reached out to Ben Nadler to see if I could get a bunch of answers.

[Archipelago; 2026] Tr. from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel When silence and darkness permeate our lives, certainty begins to dissolve. Birgitta Trotzig’s Queen, newly translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, descends into that darkness with poetic intensity. Through images of crashing Baltic waves, a decaying Swedish farm, and empty family tables, Trotzig probes the recesses of human guilt and revelation.