Eduard Mörike translated by Leopold von Loewenstein–Wertheim Oneworld Classics ($14.95) by W. C. Bamberger Eduard Mörike first published this novella in German in 1856. There have been attempts for at least the last half-century to elevate it to the status of a recognized classic. George Steiner, for example, has called it “a novella to set […]
Ernst Weiss translated by Joel Rotenberg Archipelago ($17) by Micaela Morrissette The perversity of Ernst Weiss's staggering novel Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer takes some time to reveal itself. It is not a tawdry perversity of titillating little wickednesses but a deep and thoroughgoing moral deviation, a brute injury to conscience. The degree of corruption cannot emerge, […]
Javier Marías translated by Margaret Jull Costa New Directions ($24.95) by John Toren In the last twenty years the Spanish novelist Javier Marías has produced a string of novels bearing a remarkable consistency in tone, all narrated by a solitary, ruminative observer who is obsessed by the untold histories of the people he encounters. This […]
edited by Michael Martone Indiana University Press ($22.95) by Stephanie Hlywak Is writing regional? Flannery O’Connor, whose prose was often categorized by the part of the United States in which she wrote, certainly thought so. But while we’re comfortable identifying, say, Southern gothic, is there a voice typical of the vast Midwest? This anthology aims […]
KASSANDRA AND THE WOLF Margarita Karapanou translated by N. C. Germanacos Clockroot Books ($15) RIEN NE VA PLUS Margarita Karapanou translated by Karen Emmerich Clockroot Books ($15) by Kristin Thiel Born in 1946 and writing through the Greek and international upheavals that marked the following decades, Margarita Karapanou today remains a unique writer, though during […]
Rikki Ducornet illustrated by T. Motley Dalkey Archive Press ($13.95) by Steve Tomasula On the eroded hillside of a graveyard near my childhood home, we often found the bones of infants. Throughout one spring, we kids played with the tiny skulls and tried to arrange ribs into skeletons, thinking they’d come from monkeys. Then one […]
Joy Ladin Sheep Meadow Press ($15.95) by Warren Woessner Someone once wrote that there are only two plots to a story: "a man sets out on a journey" or "a stranger comes to town." Transmigration, by Joy (once Jay) Ladin, is a collection of poetry that tries to develop both of these themes: a male becomes […]
Allison Benis White Cleveland State University Poetry Center ($15.95) by Stephen Burt I fell for these prose poems the moment I started to read them, and I liked them even more once I figured out their donnée. Each of White's elegant one-to-two-page works takes its title and one (only one) of its subjects from a sketch, […]
James Schuyler edited by James Meetze and Simon Pettet Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($28) by Claude Peck In a 1965 letter to his painter friend Fairfield Porter, poet James Schuyler mentioned his non-light summer reading, which included Proust, Dante, and Shakespeare. Schuyler liked Shakespeare’s late comedies best, with his favorite being As You Like It. “It’s […]
Hiromi Itō translated by Jeffrey Angles Action Books ($16) by Lucas de Lima and Sarah Fox Hiromi Itō has enjoyed literary acclaim in Japan since the 1980s, particularly after the publication of On TerrItōry 2 (1985) and On TerrItōry 1 (1987), both of which broke new ground in their forthright explorations of the female body, sexuality, and motherhood. Itō […]