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There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, Kikuko Tsumura’s latest novel, translated by Polly Barton, follows a nameless protagonist, who, in the wake of burnout from a job she’s worked at for 14 years, decides to quit. Her new mission is to find a job that “requires no reading, no writing, and ideally, very little thinking.” Throughout the course of the novel, spanning a time period of one year, our protagonist will traverse through five different jobs, each one as mundane and as odd as the next one...

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Parakeet is a vortex of symbolism and metaphors. Through the main character known solely as The Bride, we are taken into a world that is very much like our own but one that teeters into surrealism. When we first encounter The Bride, she’s engaging in conversation with a parakeet whom she understands to be her dead grandmother. She’s about to be married but is having some intense second thoughts. The pressure she feels, as her wedding day looms closer, begins to manifest in...