Mayra Montero Translated by Edith Grossman Ecco Press ($22.95) by Kristin Thiel Although there is something troubling about giving audience to a pompous male as he recounts his past sexual exploits—which a reader must do for Deep Purple's narrator, classical music critic Agustín Cabán—author Mayra Montero's point is a melancholy one to which we can […]
Elizabeth Costello J. M. Coetzee Viking ($24.95) by Michael Sayeau The newest Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee is back with a novel that follows the life of an aging female Australian novelist and which takes the form of a series of public lectures and the stories that surround them. Or: the newest Nobel Prize winner […]
Jorge Amado Translated by Barbara Shelby Merello University of Wisconsin Press ($16.95) by Alicia L. Conroy The songs of the samba circle and Afro-Brazilian candomblé rites, scents of rose perfume and fish frying in palm oil, the whirl of drunken camaraderie and violent police raids, cigar smoke in boardrooms and whispers in bedrooms—welcome to the […]
Nelly Reifler Simon & Schuster ($21) by Neil Kozlowicz Reading Nelly Reifler's debut collection of short stories, See Through, you'll feel an impulse to avert your gaze, as from the adrenaline-shot scene in Pulp Fiction—but you can't. Averting your gaze, in this case, means missing out on the dark unspoken thoughts and actions of characters […]
Edited by Christian Bök House of Anansi ($22.95) by Nicholas Birns The reader's eye may be drawn first to John Riddell's four-page comic-book riff on the possible verbal permutations of "Pope Leo"—but this volume's triumphs are verbal, not visual. Ground Works, an anthology of innovative Canadian fiction, is worth its price for two remarks alone: […]
Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers ($16.95) Eden, Eden, Eden ($13.95) Creation Books by Rod Smith You think you've read them all—all the writers with powerfully wicked imaginations, that is. Maybe you caught the bug in high school: there you were in English class, slumped on your desk, cuffing The Ticket That Exploded like a Playboy inside […]
Volume 1: The Tower, $22.95 Volume 2: The Delta, $21.95 Volume 3: The Magician , $21.95 Volume 4: Shadowland, $14.95 Hampton Roads Publishing Company Colin Wilson by Kris Lawson In the acknowledgements to Shadowland, the brand-new installment of Colin Wilson's science fantasy Spider World, Wilson—noted author of more than 80 books ranging from criminology to […]
Bandula Chandraratna Black Sparrow Books / David R. Godine ($24.95) by Christopher J. Lee The story behind this novel is almost as good as the story within it. Bandula Chandraratna self-published Mirage in England in 1999, only to find his book go on to be a favorite in that year's Booker Prize competition. The merit […]
Edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts Night Shade Books ($24) by Justin Maxwell The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases—let's call it The Guide for short—showcases the fictive imagination unencumbered by plot or protagonist. An engaging and humorous read, The Guide virtually abandons the traditional tropes of conflict, climax, and […]