New York. W.W. Norton. 2012. ISBN 9780393083217Sylvia Plath did it with the oven door ajar. John Kennedy Toole did it with a garden hose. Hart Crane did it with the famous farewell, “Goodbye, eve…
FICTION
- David Williams, tr. Brooklyn, New York. Archipelago. 2012. ISBN 9781935744320Mama Leone, by Miljenko Jergović (b. 1966), has an interesting structure: the first part of the book, “W…
- Brian Bergstrom & Lucy Fraser, tr. Oakland, California. PM Press (IPG, distr.). 2012. ISBN 9781604865912“My wish is for the words in these stories to . . . lodge themselves within the b…
- Bristol. Tangent. 2012. ISBN 9781906477608My Mother Was an Upright Piano is Tania Hershman’s second collection of very short stories—her first, The White Road and Other Stories, was…
- Liesl Schillinger, tr. New York / London. Viking / Chatto & Windus. 2012. ISBN 9780670023509 / 0701186944Readers and foreign presses have embraced Every Day, Every Hour as an enchant…
- Minneapolis, Minn. Milkweed. 2013. ISBN 9781571310972In Tamas Dobozy’s previous book, Last Notes and Other Stories (see WLT Nov. 2006, 55), Hungarian survivors of World War II are ju…
- Ljouwert, Netherlands. Friese Pers. 2012. ISBN 9789033002625In this slim novel, Sietse de Vries continues to play with variations on the crime-novel formula. In Kugels foar Kant (see WLT…
- New York. Harper. 2012. ISBN 9780061493348Michael Chabon’s novel Telegraph Avenue, on a basic level, is about work life and home life in Oakland, California. Longtime friends Archy and Nat ow…
- Mexico City. Alfaguara. 2013. ISBN 9786071123688Through the intricate plot and multitude of characters, both principal and peripheral, Carmen Boullosa’s novel Texas seems to score a dire…
- New York. Simon & Schuster. 2012. ISBN 9781451633924A June 2012 Indie Next pick, this first novel follows six years in the life of an educated middle-class Athenian family, its father long dead, a…
- Sally-Ann Spencer, tr. London. Harvill Secker. 2012. ISBN 9781846554278Sympathy for a terrorist? Rebellion against preventive health-care measures? In Germany, Juli Zeh is a highly visible political a…
- Barcelona. Anagrama. 2012. ISBN 978-8433972359It is no accident that Juan Villoro is classified as a postmodern author. We know that, in general, literary criticism resorts to the postmodern label whe…
- Toronto. Doubleday Canada. 2012. ISBN 9780385667142The Magic of Saida, set in India, East Africa, and Canada, is the latest novel by the prolific African Asian Canadian author M. G. Vassanji.…
- Peter Sherwood, tr. London. Stork Press. 2012. ISBN 9780957132665In the first paragraph of this “were-tale for six actors, five voices, two players,” narrator Jerne Voltampere proffers fair warni…
- Camellia Nieh & Jonathan Lloyd-Davies, tr. New York. Vertical. 2012. ISBN 9781934287385In Edge, Koji Suzuki devises an inspired premise and pummels it half to death. Suzuki has…
- Victoria Cribb, tr. London. Telegram. 2012. ISBN 9781846591242Valdimar Haraldsson, in The Whispering Muse, finds that fish are both sustenance and inspiration. His preoccupation with fish con…
- Marian Schwartz, tr. Rochester, New York. Open Letter. 2012. ISBN 9781934824368 Mikhail Shishkin has been publishing in Russia to acclaim and accolades for almost twenty years. His work is a…
- Belgrade. Prosveta. 2012. ISBN 9788607019663Mitrova Amerika (Mitar’s America) is the Serbian literary contribution to the topic of immigration to the United States. In this intriguing no…
- New York. Ecco / HarperCollins. 2012. ISBN 9780062095626How seemingly easy it is to assess the latest works by authors who write slowly, who—one wants to believe—carefully measure and remeasure their…
- Seuil. Paris. 2012. ISBN 9782020986694Tierno Monénembo has traveled widely since he left Guinea in 1969 to escape Sékou Touré’s dictatorship. His novels often reflect his own experiences or are b…
- Madeline G. Levine, tr. Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern University Press. 2012. ISBN 9780810127937After a distinguished career as a ballistics and algorithms patent holder, Wilhelm Dichter start…
- New York. Riverhead. 2012. ISBN 9781594487361These days, more and more people in both the United States and Latin America are “downloadeando” music, “parqueando” their cars, and eating “lonche” in the…
- Frank Stock, tr. Los Angeles. Semiotext(e) (MIT Press, distr.). 2012. ISBN 9781584351115Abdellah Taïa’s Une mélancolie arabe was published in 2008 in Paris, where he now lives. It is in many…
- Munich. Hanser. 2012. ISBN 9783446238657If you aren’t yet familiar with Botho Strauss, one of Germany’s most critically acclaimed prose writers of the last forty years and arguably its most well-…
- Andrea G. Labinger, tr. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Latin American Literary Review Press. 2012. ISBN 9781891270505Friends of Mine contains a series of seemingly unrelated events in the liv…