Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s satire, originally published in Irish in 1949, is appearing in English translation for the first time. THE DIRTY DUST has about two dozen characters, all of whom are dead and lying in their respective graves. Written almost entirely in dialogue and set during World War II, this hilariously profane book depicts Irish villagers who can’t stop gossiping and complaining about one another. So much for resting in peace.

Kazuo Ishiguro, one of the best novelists working today, is also one of the most surprising. He has written drawing-room novels, dystopian fiction, surrealist works, and now a post-Arthurian tale of knights and ogres, of elderly villagers searching for their long-lost son, and of a she-dragon rumored to be the cause of a mist of forgetfulness that has plagued the land. As in past books, Ishiguro uses his story to meditate on memory and loss.

THERE’S SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO DO is a collection of 10 interrelated stories, the first five named after virtues, the second after vices. Charles Baxter’s point is that all of us cover the spectrum of moral qualities, as do his characters --- from the pediatrician conflicted about his work to the altruistic missionary who contracts a disease in Ethiopia and, upon returning stateside, commits robbery to pay for medicine. In Baxter’s world, as in life, decisions are rarely easy.

Kelly Link’s new story collection presents nine tales of the fantastic and the bizarre. The protagonists, most of them young women, include a teenager who hears voices in her head, an actress from a ghost-hunting reality show, a 15-year-old gamer who travels from Iowa to New York to meet an older man she met online, and a woman who departs from a bar in the company of a man who claims to be a wolfman.

The 20 interlocking vignettes in this slim novel by Yasmina Reza, author of the plays “Art” and “God of Carnage,” focus on the family lives of more than two-dozen characters. Couples bicker over such trivialities as the purchase of the wrong cheese at a grocery store or the playing of a wrong suit in bridge. As in much of Reza’s work, these conflicts are catalysts for larger arguments and the release of long-suppressed resentments.

In Greg Baxter’s second novel, his follow-up to 2013’s THE APARTMENT, an unnamed narrator waits in Munich’s fog-bound airport with his father and a US consul to transport the corpse of the expatriate narrator’s sister to America. She died alone of starvation in Berlin three weeks earlier. The book consists of flashbacks that paint a portrait of one family’s struggles and of a young man trying to come to terms with decisions he has made.

Publishers rejected this early novel by the 1998 Nobel laureate when he submitted it to them in 1953. SKYLIGHT, now appearing in English translation for the first time, dramatizes the overlapping stories of more than a dozen tenants who live in a run-down apartment complex in late 1940s Lisbon. The book is less philosophical than José Saramago’s later works, but the sly wit and left-wing politics for which he became famous are here in abundance.

This year’s Nobel laureate in literature, Patrick Modiano, wrote the three novellas in this collection as separately published works between 1988 and 1993. Each piece is a first-person narrative told by a man who, like Modiano, was born in 1945 and who reflects on his life in France in the two decades after the end of the Nazi Occupation. The stories involve a photographer with a murky past, black marketeers and a mysterious murder-suicide.

One day, Ceinwen Reilly discovers that her downstairs neighbor may have starred in a forgotten silent film that hasn’t been seen for ages. She is determined to track down the film, impress her neighbor, and become a part of movie history: the archivist as ingénue. Ceinwen and a bumbling but charming math professor she has just met will or will not discover the missing reels, will or will not fall in love, and will or will not encounter the obsessives that make up the New York silent film nut underworld.

Albanian author Ismail Kadare’s semi-autobiographical novel was originally published in 1978. This episodic book is a chronicle of the years (1958-1960) Kadare spent as a graduate student at Moscow’s Gorky Institute, a “factory of the intellect” intended to nurture a new generation of Socialist Realist writers. The novel’s centerpiece is the furor that resulted when the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel in Literature to DOCTOR ZHIVAGO author Boris Pasternak.