Review by Christopher Fletcher
Before you arrive in Ravicka you'll have to read Renee Gladman's novels set there: Event Factory, The Ravickians, and Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge. Unlike most other works of narrative fiction, in these three novels, the meaning does not reveal itself as one reads. Instead, meaning gathers in eddies along the way, swirling around a central image or idea as the reader floats past . . .
Review by Deborah Smith
There's a deceptive simplicity to many of the pieces contained in Stalin Is Dead, this slim volume from the Israeli writer Rachel Shihor. Beneath this veneer, however, a subversive sensibility and nearly obsessive attention to detail complicate Shihor’s prose . . .
Review by Alice Whitwham
Lorine Niedecker has long been something of an enigma within American poetry. Her elusiveness lies, in part, in the tremendous economy of her poems. Her immense concision—what she calls “condensery”—can make her work feel inscrutable. In the astonishing poem, Lake Superior, Niedecker’s “condensery” is practiced with unprecedented ambition . . .
Review by Jason DeYoung
As Zach plots his “arc of motions”—its meaning, cause, consequence—we are there too. Seeing through the conspiracy and untangling the complex weave of machinations which veil the moment of these words is the plot of Cannonball, which Joseph McElroy calls “my most uneasy-feeling or darkest book” . . .
Review by Justin Alvarez
The unnamed narrator in Sergio Chejfec’s latest translated novel, The Dark, straddles these two worlds: the physical reality of his surroundings and the intangible yet boundless world of thought. For Chejfec himself, the truth, it seems, matters less than the continuous search for it . . .
Review by Caroline Bleeke
What does it mean for a novel to be true, for the truth to be novelistic? Perhaps Minae Mizumura is playing a postmodern trick on us. Regardless, in A True Novel she carves a new literary form out of the shishosetsu and honkaku shosetsu traditions, as she translates or plagiarizes or reinvents Wuthering Heights in her native tongue . . .
Review by Morten Høi Jensen
Stig Sæterbakken’s characters often rail against their confinement within themselves, entertaining thoughts of birth, death and rebirth, before they come bouncing off the walls to find that there is no escape, no respite from themselves. In Through the Night, his final and most ambitious novel, Sæterbakken dramatizes this struggle with far greater poignancy than ever before . . .
Review by Jordan Anderson
Malaparte's The Skin acts on the reader of the present day in much the same way that a vaccine does; in effect, his work introduces an element of immorality in order to ultimately protect the reader against its effects . . .
Review by Thomas Patrick Wisniewski
What’s surprising isn’t a lack of unity between the tales in Jonathan Littell's The Fata Morgana Books, as one might expect, but rather a kind of bland uniformity of voice and point of view...
Review by Rose McLaren
Though powerfully written and often illuminating, Jacques Rancière’s analysis is at times overbearing and frequently skewed by his own dogma. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Béla Tarr: The Time After reads best where he strays from his theorizing, distracted in a study of the films for their own sakes...
Review by Michael Bryson
Douglas Glover’s stories in Savage Love enter mystery early and never leave. Readers are drawn along for the journey on slipstreams of luminescent prose...
Review by Christopher Fletcher
Personae proves that Sergio De La Pava's larger project of pushing the limits of the novel form is hardly finished...
Review by Adam Z. Levy
Published in Hungarian in 2008, nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, László Krasznahorkai’sSeiobo There Below depicts a search for the sacred in a sprawling, indifferent, borderless world in its current moment of decay...
Review by Jonathan Sudholt
Bleeding Edge is Thomas Pynchon’s 9/11 novel, and he turns his attention to a “post-late capitalist” military-industrial complex that is all grown up...
Review by Morten Høi Jensen
As a character in Javier Marías's The Infatuations likes to remind us, it is not the plot of a novel that is important—what happens is so easily forgotten—but rather the “possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with”...
Review by Jeff Bursey
The cover of Steven Moore's The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800 may entice. It’s of a young woman happily reading a book while lying nude on her bed. No men disturb her bedroom pursuit of pleasure...
Review by Madeleine LaRue
Anne Carson's Red Doc>, though populated by visionaries and prophets, is in part about the undoing of that youthful action, about learning not to see...
Review by Ian Patterson
Iva Bittová’s eclecticism is evident on her debut as leader for ECM, an intimate solo performance where her voice blends with violin and kalimba in an intoxicating brew that is both ethereal and invigoratingly rootsy...
Review by Cecil Lytle
Matthew Guerrieri’s The First Four Notes takes on the task of unraveling the meaning and mystery of that reverberative quartet of notes that have made Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (Opus 67) an iconic symbol...
Review by K. Thomas Kahn
Cees Nooteboom’s poetic prose fuses reality and dreams in uncanny ways that often mirror prosaically what Max Neumann does visually...
