Book Reviews
by Peter Augerot
*****Original Message***** (Hunt & Light) exists precisely at the place where people write forlorn Facebook statuses instead of diary entries. The title, stylized with five asterisks on either end, suggests an email thread—a representation of new definitions words have taken on in the past two…
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by Nora Rawn
Works in translation occupy a strange, pleasing limbo for well-rounded readers. Typically they enter public notice after the first cycle of literary prizes abroad has rained down on the head of the author, but before foregone conclusions and assumptions precede the books themselves. Each novel…
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by Beth Steidle
Billed as an “existential murder mystery,” Norah Labiner‘s fourth novel, Let the Dark Flower Blossom (Coffee House Press), will subsume you. It’s a protean universe—lush with scandal, violence, and perverse glamour—where everything and nothing is true. All of the tantalizing ingredients of a solid mystery…
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by Matt Pieknik
In fifteenth century Italy, the zibaldone appeared. A new type of book, the zibaldone collected bits and pieces of various texts according to its compiler’s taste, adhering to no other discernible order. Quotations from literature, personal reflections, scientific observations, aphorisms, philosophical insights, philological investigations, and…
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by Ian F. King
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Book Reviews
Edwin Trommelen’s Davai! The Russians and Their Vodka (Russian Life Books) is as comprehensive a book as one could hope to find on the six-hundred year love/hate affair between Russia and vodka, the sacred and profane ‘little water,’ a name which almost seems to denote…
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by Jon Boulier
The Story of My Purity’s narrator, Piero Rosini, teeters on the edge of his fanatical Catholic faith. He doesn’t realize this, of course, but we do. As we observe Piero looking for a way out of his job as an editor at Non Possumus —…
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by Ian F. King
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Book Reviews
Going in to Melissa Harrison’s debut novel, Clay (Bloomsbury), it helps to understand the extent to which the focus of the book comes from the author’s own personal perspective. Harrison grew up in a very verdant area of Britain, and, upon later moving to a…
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by Ian F. King
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Book Reviews
The National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, was built in 1938, and in its first decades played host to many major events, including the World Cup in 1962. After September 11th, 1973, when a coup d’etat in Chile overthrew the elected leader Salvador Allende and installed…
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by Maggie Beauvais
Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (Graywolf Press) is distinguished English professor and prolific author Percival Everett’s twenty-fifth novel and is being hailed—as the dizzying title reflects—his most labyrinthine and “category-defying” to date. The book opens with an exhaustingly intellectual old man sitting in a nursing…
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by Beth Steidle
The short story has long been a hotbed for the wicked, off-kilter, anomalous, and unnoticeable. Blame the brevity of the genre’s form, which allows for a degree of leniency with backstory, character development, and the logic of a fictional universe—a suspension of disbelief perfect for…
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by Jennifer Udden
The Sky Conducting, Michael J. Seidlinger’s debut novel, is a sometimes unsettling, often dry entry into the annals of post-apocalyptic dystopian literature. In it, America is dead of an unknown event, and the only Americans left are a family. The nuclear family, as it is…
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by Sean Jones
It’s Fine By Me (Graywolf Press) is a familiar story of a tough kid, a menacing father, and a lonely and often brutal coming of age. The plot is a good fit for Per Petterson’s brusque style and Norwegian heritage; the country’s cold and unforgiving…
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by Ian F. King
Looking at them collectively, the premises of J. Robert Lennon’s novels may at times seem like particular creative writing assignments that he has given to himself. On the Night Plain, his third, and arguably finest, was an American West noir in a post-WWII setting. Mailman…
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by McGrath Tandy
As if the psychological fallout of war wasn’t a poignant enough trope (namely Afghanistan), Hold It ‘Til It Hurts (Coffee House Press) takes on the intricate delicacies of identity, family, and the socio-economic structures - especially race - that determine both our place and understanding…
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by Ian F. King
Michael Kimball’s new novel, BIG RAY (Bloomsbury), about a man’s deceased 500 pound father, is a slim 180 pages of more than 500 short entries ranging in size from a couple of paragraphs to a single sentence. These cosmetic contrasts of size are but one…
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by Chelsea Allison
Antigone has a long history of retellings, though none so modern or comedic as this new turn from the poet Anne Carson, which is loosely inspired by Sophokles’s classic version.
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by Audrey Schomer
Perhaps most famous for its seven-hour film adaptation by Bela Tarr, this is the first translation of Lazlo Krasznahorkai‘s breakthrough novel, Satantango (New Directions), to appear in English since its original publication in 1985, twenty-seven years ago. Renowned poet-translator George Szirtes’ (The Slant Door) latest…
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by McGrath Tandy
Toggling in time between modern-day Russia, the Siege of Leningrad, and the ineffable romance of Paris, Andreï Makine’s rather short, but rarely sweet novel, The Life of an Unknown Man (Graywolf Press), deftly explores some age-old archetypes—the woes of war, the nature of identity, and…
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by Sean Jones
Whenever a big test match bubbles up to the international sports headlines, I start to get uncomfortable. As a sports fan, I want to like—or at least understand—cricket, but I’ve never been able to make sense out of its mysterious scoring, languid pace, and baroque,…
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by Jennifer Udden
In Kevin Barry’s new novel City of Bohane (Graywolf Press), it is easy to be swept under by the sheer inventiveness of his writing and the deeply imagined shape of the world he’s created. Bohane, a fictional town surrounded by the Big Nothing on the…
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by Alexia Nader
Certainly no one would be able to capture him in a story the way that Nescio, a businessman-cum-writer did in “The Freeloader.” The multitalented Dutchman went by the pen name Nescio but was really J.H.F. Grönloh, a successful director of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company, who created what many consider some of the greatest Dutch modern writing of the early 20th century.
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by Audrey Schomer
Set against the backdrop of Russian history from the time of Peter the Great to the post-Soviet collapse, Stephan Eirik Clark‘s debut collection of short stories Vladimir’s Mustache () invokes a remarkable series of history’s ghosts. Each builds shuddering momentum, like a…
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by Ian F. King
Recently, there was a major news story about Russian scientists in Antarctica who, after drilling down through over two miles of ice, had reached Lake Vostok, the largest sub-glacial lake in the world. They were looking for what life, if any, they might find there,…
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by Sarah Gerard
The namesake story of Thomas P. Balázs’s debut collection, Omicron Ceti III (Aqueous Books), opens with a list by Erik, the wry and institutionalized main character. As well-developed a personality as any Balázs creates, Erik demonstrates both what works and what doesn’t about Balázs’s collection…
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by Matthew Dreiling
Almost two years have passed since Liu Xiaobo, the poet, professor and political dissident, won the Nobel Peace Prize (becoming the first person from mainland China to receive the distinction). However, Beijing was not pleased by Liu’s award, as he is currently serving an eleven-year…
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by Richard Jackson
‘He was a social democrat and a fool, but may the Lord grant him eternal glory.’ There is a moment in Ladislav Klíma’s previous novel from Twisted Spoon Press, The Sufferings of Prince, where the poor prince, an aristocrat and favourite of the German Kaiser,…
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by Morten Høi Jensen
Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press) marks the poet’s first foray into prose fiction—with, it has to be said, very impressive results. This is an unusual American novel, sensitive to contemporary politics, absorbent of modern technology, weary of the easy consolations of…
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by Chelsea Allison
There exists an old adage, or so we’re told in Gianni Rodari’s Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto (Melville House), “that the man whose name is spoken remains alive.”
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by Sean Jones
You will be reading Dukla (Dalkey Archive Press), Andrzej Stasiuk’s meditation on the titular Polish resort town, and suddenly you will realize you haven’t been reading at all. You’ve been lost in a complicated daydream, entranced by a wash of above-ground light through a subway…
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by Tori Schacht
“It’s not for everyone,” explains Joe, proprietor of Lightning Rods, Inc., to a bewildered new applicant. “We’re looking for the kind of woman who is confident about herself. The kind of woman who has aims she wants to achieve. We’re looking for someone with maturity…
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by Sarah Twombly
Khaled Mattawa, a leading English translator of Arabic poetry, often raises the issue of how a book might travel out of one culture and into another. From thematic incongruities, to language barriers (idioms, tenses, slang), to unshared histories, not all books achieve what they are…
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by Heather Green
The mystery at the heart of The Lake lies in Nakajima's past--a traumatic childhood event that has left him "extremely frail." As Nakajima begins to heal, in part due to Chihiro's strength, and in part through visits to the titular lake, the tragic events of his past come to light.
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by Ian F. King
“Why bother?” From the mouth of a stubborn pubescent, this question usually gets a smirk. However, in the case of Mathea Martinsen, the protagonist of Kjersti A. Skomsvold’s touching and spare debut, THE FASTER I WALK, THE SMALLER I AM (published by Dalkey Archive Press,…
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by Richard Jackson
‘The meaning of life is purely a Russian fabrication. We fabricated it for the very same reason the Asians fabricated Buddhism: presumably from want of life’s basic necessities.’ Vyacheslav Pyetsukh’s THE NEW MOSCOW PHILOSOPHY reads like an anthology of short stories from Russia’s finest writers…
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by Iza Wojciechowska
The mythical town of Stitchings is coming apart at the seams: unfortunate deaths riddle the town, snow never melts, the people are preoccupied with war, and monkeys from a traveling circus have put counterfeit money into circulation, ruining the local economy. In Magdalena Tulli’s In Red, beautifully translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston, we follow the evolution of a small, dreamlike town that itself is the novel’s protagonist just as much as it is its antagonist.
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by Jennifer Udden
Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury) is a slow burn over the eleven days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, following the life of Esch, a pregnant teen in rural Louisiana who is obsessed with the story of Medea and her neighbor, Manny. Esch is…
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by Sean Jones
Rae Bryant’s The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals (Patasola Press) is a book about love and sex, but that description is the only one that will make Morals seem typical. Bryant has a unique curiosity with the tools and the products of human relationships—naked bodies,…
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by Sarah Twombly
Netsuke (Coffee House Press) opens with a loathsome scene of debauched lust, and from there goes further and further down the rabbit hole into the twisted wonderland of the narrator’s mind. But do not turn away from the dark, because what Rikki Ducornet has managed…
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by Frederica Bepler
A novel of place and character, R. Zamora Linmark‘s Leche (Coffee House Press) focuses on six days in the life of Vicente “Vince” de Los Reyes, as he returns to his birthplace, the Philippines, after thirteen years of living in Hawaii. As he travels to…
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by Richard Jackson
Where Imre Kertész’s literature differs – as recognized by the Nobel committee – is in the way it tackles the complicated relationship between history and art, addressing the author’s own discomfort at being a ‘Holocaust novelist’, questioning his own reasons for writing and demanding answers, as opposed to following a strict autobiographical format.
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by Sean Jones
In the 262 pages of The Coffins of Little Hope (Unbridled Books), Timothy Schaffert packs 61 chapters, 11 “parts,” a kidnapping drama, a bestselling children’s fantasy series, a local newspaper’s struggle to survive, and an overflowing small town milieu including an elderly obituary writer, an…
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by Chandler Klang Smith
A Scanner Darkly gave us a would-be sleuth befuddled by drug addiction; Memento delivered exposition in a way that mirrored the protagonist’s memory loss; Motherless Brooklyn cracked the classic gumshoe’s invulnerable façade by reimagining him as governed by Tourettic compulsions. But The Dewey Decimal System does all of the above – and then some.
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by Jennifer Udden
Populated by folks scraping by under the poverty line in a rural setting, Alan Heathcock’s Volt (Graywolf Press) easily qualifies as country noir, Winter’s Bone with fewer meth addicts. A son helps his injured father drag a body up a hill, wrapped in a handmade…
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This short book’s force is in its specificity. It evokes the experience of a certain person – what he thought, felt, and sensed – until he decided to take his own life.
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by Olena Jennings
Though lacking an overarching story, the book covers the major phases of the protagonist’s life, and is held together by motifs – the father’s trips to the bar, a girl with a small red mark on her cheek, excursions into nature, and sexual fetish.
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by Adam Eaglin
It’s not uncommon these days to hear a literary critic bemoan the decline of the short story. But despite the handwringing, the last decade has given us some extraordinary short story collections, often introducing great young literary talents like Yiyun Li and Jhumpa Lahiri, or…
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It’s too bad for Kayankaya that he lacks the snap of his name, and isn’t able to hold his own even in an exchange with his physician.
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by Sean Jones
There exists a brand of individual whose life comes down to a story: men and women whose lives are irrevocably defined by a series of indelible childhood events. We know little of the life story of Raj, the protagonist of Nathacha Appanah‘s The Last Brother,…
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