Khairy Shalaby translated by Adam Talib American University in Cairo Press ($24.95) by Brooke Horvath The Hashish Waiter is the seventieth book by Khairy Shalaby, the 2003 winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature who passed away this past September. The subject this time is a dime bag’s worth of the “eighty percent of the […]
Diego Marani translated by Judith Landry Daedalus ($15.99) by John Toren In New Finnish Grammar, Diego Marani has set himself the difficult task of telling the story of a man who has no story. The central character, Sampo Karjalainen, has lost all memory of the past—we don’t know quite how—and also his command of language. To […]
Dean Bakopoulos Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($24) by Will Wlizlo Why are you unhappy? Is it something small, like an unpaid electric bill or an obnoxious television show? Perhaps your job’s a bore or your mother hates you? Or maybe there’s something bigger, some nebulous, draining zeitgeist hanging over the country that’s dragging you down with […]
A. D. Miller Anchor ($14.95) by Malcolm Forbes Miller’s debut novel concerns Nick Platt, a rootless Englishman up to his neck in lawless, modern-day Moscow. His hero becomes a victim of a scam and a victim in love and slides into moral meltdown. We read on wondering how, if at all, he will go about […]
China Miéville Del Rey ($16) by Nathaniel Forsythe In the early 17th century, the Tokugawa shogunate that ruled Japan imposed the policy of sakoku, prohibiting all trade with westerners except through the artificial island of Dejima, in Nagasaki harbor. The shogun wanted commerce to be easier to control, to prevent rival clans from using foreign technologies […]
John Sayles McSweeney’s ($29) by Joshua Willey It is the perfect moment for a novel like the latest from filmmaker John Sayles, A Moment in the Sun. As the ephemeral euphorias of social networking begin to wane and election season begins to wax, a tome of literary historical fiction might provide many with an encouraging reminder […]
Florence Howe The Feminist Press ($24.95) by E. J. Levy A perennial problem of modern American feminism, Susan Faludi convincingly claimed in Harper’s last year, is that it’s matricidal. Whereas in the nineteenth century, mothers—charged with being a republican force in the domestic sphere—collaborated with daughters to win rights, such bonds suffered after suffrage: within a year of winning […]
Erik Larson Crown ($26) by Rebecca Morales It is easy to wonder how Hitler gained so much power so quickly, and with so little resistance. While the details of his ascent are described in countless biographies and the warning signs are recounted in every book of World War II history, In the Garden of Beasts takes a […]
Edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annelies Laschitza Translated by George Shriver Verso Books ($39.95) by Vladislav Davidzon The apartment in which I write this essay stands on a central street in a major post-Soviet, Eastern European city—a street once named after the incomparable Rosa Luxemburg. It does not matter which city, because every […]
Roberto Simanowski University of Minnesota Press ($25) by Chris Funkhouser Digital Art and Meaning begins by responding to Roy Ascott’s concept of “telematic embrace,” challenging the general proclivity to assign production of meaning solely to an artwork’s audience; to the contrary, this book boldly proclaims how it “embraces the advances of the critic.” In various ways, […]