Robert Silverberg University of Nebraska Press ($16.95) by Kristin Livdahl Robert Silverberg is probably best known for his science fiction but he has published a large amount of nonfiction—over ninety books—on wide ranging subjects from sex and science to history and biography. Originally published in 1965, Scientists and Scoundrels is a compendium of tales about scientific frauds […]

edited by Martin F. Norden Rodopi ($77) by Brian Bergen-Aurand There is no theory of ethics . . . without storytelling and the temporalization (in several senses of the word) which is an intrinsic feature of all narrative. —J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading The story of evil is the story of remorse. That is […]

Kirk Nesset University of Pittsburgh Press ($24.95) by Karen Walcott In Paradise Road, the 2007 winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Kirk Nesset displays his mastery of the short story form in twelve rich and well-developed stories. Nesset, a professor of English and Creative Writing at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, takes the reader through various […]

Peter Høeg translated by Nadia Christensen Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($26) by Poul Houe On its jacket Peter Høeg’s recent novel is called “a fast-paced philosophical thriller that blends social realism with the literary fantastic.” Forget about “fast-paced” and “social realism,” and put “quasi-“ before “philosophical,” and you’ll be better prepared for the many pages […]

THE CITY IN CRIMSON CLOAK Asli Erdogan translated by Amy Spangler Soft Skull Press ($14.95) I HAVE THE RIGHT TO DESTROY MYSELF Young-Ha Kim Translated by Chi-Young Kim Harcourt ($12) by Alan DeNiro Two novels recently published in America—though originally published in Turkey in 1998 and South Korea in 1996, respectively—cast twin lights onto unsettling storytelling […]

Owen Egerton Dalton Publishing ($13.95) by Stephen Clair Do you remember writing short stories in third grade where, mid-story, just as you were running out of room on the page, you did the only logical thing? You suddenly ended the story by having the protagonist meet his or her maker by whatever twist popped into […]

Tom McCarthy Vintage ($13.95) by Ken Chen In Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, a man suffers a traumatic injury and adopts an unusual method of recovery: a quest for authenticity. He builds enormous sets and hires actors to resurrect his life from before the accident, careful that his stagecraft not only mimics but recreates his previous more […]

edited by Justin Taylor Thunder’s Mouth Press ($15.95) by Spencer Dew Apocalyptic thought projects fears, hopes, and grudges onto a cataclysmic fantasy. A human seer, in such scenarios, casts his subjective location onto a cosmic canvas, with results that act as metaphors for earthly loss, political foibles, laments for absent justice, egotistic daydreams, or expressions […]

COMPLICATIONS Garrett Caples Meritage Press ($16) NO REAL LIGHT Joe Wenderoth Wave Books ($14) by Kevin Carollo Both Garrett Caples and Joe Wenderoth have been busy this century, and 2008 finds them on top of their game. It’s been eight years since Caples’s groundbreaking first collection, the archly titled Garrett Caples Reader (1999), and almost as many […]

edited by Zhang Er and Chen Dongdong Talisman House ($25.95) by Lucas Klein In the series of poems “Translation,” “Revising,” and “Outcry”—three poems exhibited in Another Kind of Nation—Huang Canran narrates the development of a translator in a Hong Kong news agency as he wrestles with international affairs, editorial interference, and local political action, all from […]