Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($28) by Tim Jacobs For those who like their fiction burly and tough, and have an abiding fascination with the difficult (to use Yeats’s phrase), Jonathan Franzen isn’t your man—he eschews the difficult and has declaimed in an essay on William Gaddis, “Mr. Difficult,” that literary fiction needn’t be […]
Alta Ifland Ninebark Press ($16) by Matthew Thrasher Is Alta Ifland a real person, and if so, does she know real people? Her recent collection of short stories, Elegy for a Fabulous World, doesn’t provide any easy answers. Half memoir, half fantasy, the collection sprawls across two continents and a lifetime, tracing a cast of characters […]
Kang Kyǒng-ae translated by Samuel Perry The Feminist Press ($16.95) by Sun Yung Shin From Wǒnso Pond is a novel that tears the veil off a society struggling to transition from a traditional, agricultural way of life to a modern industrial economy. Kang Kyǒng-ae delivers a portrait of the ordinary individuals whose lives are torn apart […]
Roberto Bolaño translated by Natasha Wimmer New Directions ($16) by Joshua Willey It’s a relief to know there are still enough people reading fiction to support trends such as the Roberto Bolaño craze of the past few years. The great Viscerealist, may he rest in peace, took the English-language literary scene by storm first with […]
Daniel Kehlmann translated by Carol Brown Janeway Pantheon Books ($24) by Salvatore Ruggiero Daniel Kehlmann’s new work, Fame, may be one of the few examples of a collection of stories that when brought together actually constitute a novel. The nine tales and their respective characters only become stronger and more lucid when seen through the alternate […]
Joshua Mohr Two Dollar Radio ($16) by Adam Hall At the start of Joshua Mohr’s newest novel, a young woman named Mired (pronounced “Mee-red,” though her emotional state suggests otherwise) is planted in a dental chair getting all of her broken teeth replaced. The first of Termite Parade’s three rotating narrators, Mired likens herself in the […]
Jon Fosse translated by Damion Searls Dalkey Archive ($12.95) by Alison Barker In Aliss at the Fire, Norwegian writer Jon Fosse has created a deceptively slim (100 pages) novel that unequivocally calls bullshit on the conventional wisdom that if you wait long enough, time will heal the pain of grief. Over twenty years ago, Signe’s husband […]
by Mark Gustafson Essay: Theater of the brain. —David Shields The high-velocity technological maelstrom that we are caught up in—this wired, channel-changing, information-rich, DIY culture (amateurs all) in which attention spans are decreasing as notions of the self (a wiki?) are in transition if not disarray—is the main territory Ander Monson (editor of the online […]
by Allan Vorda Born in Western Colorado and raised on a fifteen-acre farm, Paolo Bacigalupi attended Oberlin College, where he decided to major in Chinese—a choice that enabled him to teach in China and visit such countries as India, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. He drew upon his experiences in the Far […]
by Ken L. Walker Referring to a recent statement that the recording artist M.I.A. made in Interview magazine, Edwin Torres advises that if you wake up in the morning and want to do something easy, then something is wrong. That work ethic has led Torres to become a trailblazer, be it through his radical text and performance […]