Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry Edited by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer Accents Publishing ($16.95) by Holly Karapetkova For most Americans, Bulgaria remains a shadowy presence, a nebulous country somewhere in Eastern Europe that was part of the former Soviet Bloc. It has not attracted the same political attention as many of its neighbors, and much of its […]

Erika Meitner BOA Editions ($16) by Michele Balze In Erika Meitner’s Copia, the abundance of language referred to in the title springs from the American landscape. From the suburbs to the decaying city of Detroit, Meitner uncovers richness of meaning in plain American language. Common objects and signage become mediums for recovering history and personal […]

Philip Hoare Melville House ($27.99) by Ryder W. Miller Many people feel beckoned by the ocean; there is something in the sea air that feels magical and poetic. However, because of the arduous nature of seafaring life, many people prefer to experience it via armchair travel with documentaries and books. With The Sea Inside, British […]

Jennifer Kelly University of Illinois Press ($65) Kelsey Irving Beson In the introduction to In Her Own Words: Conversations with Composers in the United States, author Jennifer Kelly describes the obstacles to programming classical music by women: As a conductor, I have found that published compositions by women can be difficult to come by, and, […]

Edited by Barbara Cassin Translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood Translated by Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein, and Michael Syrotinski Princeton University Press ($65) by John Toren The challenges of exposing the full range of meaning conveyed by even a single word can be the subject of an […]

Mario Bellatin Edited by Daniel Parra Translated by Kolin Jordan 7Vientos ($19.95) by Greg Baldino and Adrian Nelson In the classic fuzzy logic problem, a boat undergoes a series of repairs, replacing each plank of wood one at a time until the entire boat is made of new wood. The question is asked if it […]

The Beatles: All These Years, Vol. 1 Mark Lewisohn Crown Archetype ($40) by Britt Aamodt There has never been another band like the Beatles. There have been other phenoms: Shakespeare, Mozart, Bob Dylan. But no one ever captured the buoyancy, irreverence, ambition, and group chemistry tied to a creative big bang the way the Beatles […]

W.G. Sebald translated by Jo Catling Random House ($26) by E. J. Iannelli A Place in the Country is the posthumous and inexplicably belated English translation of a series of related essays by W.G. Sebald on influential (from the author’s autobiographical perspective, at any rate) writers and artists such as Johann Peter Hebel, Eduard Mörike, […]

James Robertson Other Press ($15.95) by Catherine Rockwood James Robertson is a Scottish author specializing in carefully researched, big-concept novels that address what’s known, mostly within the UK, as the Question of Scotland. That being: what is to be done about a “country that is not fully a country, a nation that does not quite […]

Miyuki Miyabe translated by Daniel Huddleston Haikasoru/VIZ Media ($14.99) by Douglas Luman Although several of Miyuki Miyabe’s books have been translated into English, American readers may be most familiar with the 2007 translation of her fantasy novel Brave Story, her novelization of the Ico video game series narrative, or the 1999 novel All She Was […]