Martín Kohan Translated by Nick Caistor Serpent’s Tail Books ($14.95) by John Toren Though set largely in the provincial town of Trelew, Patagonia, circa 1973, Seconds Out contains several plot lines woven around an event that took place in New York City a half-century earlier—the famous heavyweight bout between Jack Dempsey and the Argentine Luis Angel Firpo, […]
Andrew Krivak Bellevue Literary Press ($14.95) by Amy Henry Facing extreme poverty and unemployment in Austria in the late 1800s, the optimistic Ondrej Vinich is certain that a better future lies in America, so he takes his wife on the harrowing journey across the ocean. Their first son is born immediately after their arrival in […]
Ananda Devi Translated by Jean Anderson Host Publications ($29.99) by Kris Lawson Although it “speaks of sideroads, of secret encounters, of nights spent dying in surrender to your dreams, the better to live again through other impulses and other surrenders,” the tango in Ananda Devi’s novel takes place firmly in Delhi. Subhadra and an unnamed […]
Roya Movafegh Full Court Press ($15) by Kristin Thiel This is not your grandmother’s memoir—it’s your contemporary’s, and it’s cloaked in fiction and fable. Author Roya Movafegh does not claim The People with No Camel as nonfiction, but it appears to be much more than simply “based on a true story.” As with her narrator, Movafegh was […]
Moacyr Scliar Translated by David William Foster Texas Tech University Press ($24.95) by Douglas Messerli Often described as the major Jewish author of Brazil, Moacyr Scliar, who grew up in the south of the country in Porto Alegre, died this year on February 27, soon after this translation of his earliest fiction, The War in Bom […]
Tina May Hall University of Pittsburgh Press ($16.95) by Tessa Mellas As a physical object, Tina May Hall's story collection The Physics of Imaginary Objects is a tiny, perfect thing. But then, so are the stories contained therein. Hall’s collection amounts to a mere 150 pages; one senses that when she writes, she spurns computers and stands […]
Orson Scott Card Subterranean ($35) by William Alexander Orson Scott Card has rewritten Hamlet. The back of this slim novella boasts that once we have read this "revelatory version of the Hamlet story, Shakespeare's play will be much more fun to watch—because now you'll know what's really going on." The author has previously updated other Shakespearean […]
Christopher R. Howard Seven Stories Press ($14.95) by Natalie Storey Christopher Howard’s debut novel, Tea in Ulaanbaatar, begins with a Peace Corps volunteer who, in a drug-induced stupor in an apartment in Ulaanbaatar, finally remembers the lines to a Mongolian poem he has forgotten. “The words appear like the faintest light,” Howard writes. “Like a flash […]
David Foster Wallace Little, Brown and Company ($28) by Rich Gangelhoff Although the center of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel,The Pale King, does not hold, the writing itself still fascinates. Certainly there were challenges in bringing this final Wallace doorstop to print. Michael Pietsch writes in his Editor’s Note that before his suicide Wallace left […]
Barry Hannah Grove Press ($27.50) by John Madera Notwithstanding its Evil Knievel-style dust jacket—meant perhaps to evoke the titillating, slash-and-burn early lifestyle of its author—the real daredevil pyrotechnics, the true daring and attack, of Barry Hannah’s Long, Last, Happy: New and Selected Stories, are its heavily-machined sentences, prose that may be indebted as much to Hemingway’s […]