The short flash pieces that comprise Sharon White’s Boiling Lake read like dispatches from a dreamscape—or perhaps a nightmarescape. Surreal, dark, and unmoored from time, these journal entries are well-crafted machines that merge fairytale, myth, and history into concise forms spanning no more than a page and a half. While some of these stories build narrative bridges—recurring characters include a girl nominated for sainthood and New World explorers reporting back to higher-ups—many exist as discrete moments, indulging in provocative imagery without the expectation of elaboration. There is skill in this work that allows one to dwell in the temporary, to ...

“The linoleum swells with stories. As he plays, darkness rises from the floor and slowly claims the room.” With these unsettling, intriguing first lines, we enter the mind and story of Stub, a six-year-old who observes the broken, embittered adults in his world. Growing up, he’s learning, requires giving up not only childish things but childish wonder, too. Abandoned by his mother, neglected by his father, briefly cared for by Jenny (a sweet but “crazy, sort of” young woman just sprung from the local “madhouse”), the boy becomes a refugee on the college campus where his father works as a ...

There’s something about summer heat that pounds the world into a flat, dusty slab. Your mouth dries out, and your brain loses its moisture and turns to lizardy thoughts instead. Compassion? It’s in short supply. “For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring,” Shakespeare said. Yuri Herrera’s short novel The Transmigration of Bodies is all blood and madness, a noir fantasy set against a hard-baked Mexican landscape ...

A Canadian in Paris who must always remind her French friends that she is not American. A young widow who remarries a Frenchman, whom she later divorces. A twenty-seven-year-old who is “about like [she] always [was], to tell . . . the truth. Reading instead of listening.” This is Shirley Perrigny, formerly Higgins (nee Norrington), and the protagonist of Mavis Gallant’s 1970 novel A Fairly Good Time. Gallant, just like Shirley, was a Canadian who made Paris her home. Perhaps known best for her acclaimed short stories, Gallant wrote two novels, A Fairly Good Time and Green Water, Green Sky ...

Daniel Saldaña París’s Among Strange Victims, translated by Christina MacSweeney, immediately pulls the reader into its universe. It does so with such thorough and seamless skill that the reader becomes a victim of this strange, off-kilter world. While it’s initially easy to get lost trying to find the meaning, or premise in general, of the series of peculiar events that passes throughout the novel, the ride is worth the suspension of belief. What starts with a proposal in the form of a note, at first presumably left by a snarky, administrative coworker, becomes the catalyst in the marriage of Rodrigo ...

The Deathmask of El Gaucho functions cohesively for not only El Gaucho’s recurring appearances across the eight stories that shape the novella, but for the overriding themes introduced in this key story. Identity and the temporary nature of all things are at the heart of Mancilla’s work, and his fast-moving prose, suffused with wrestling lingo, such as suplexes and figure-four leg locks, bring the concepts to life in compulsively literary and subversive ways. El Gaucho is consumed with and by the identity he projects to the world. Mancilla uses Levesque and The Mask as a push-pull in the search for ...

Daniel Sada’s One Out of Two is beautiful and bizarre. The novel, translated by the prolific Spanish-to-English translator, Katherine Silver, follows the Gamal sisters, furiously hard-working and identical middle-aged twins who work as seamstresses in the small town of Ocampo, Mexico. A sign hanging in their shop reads: “WE ARE BUSY PROFESSIONALS. RESTRICT YOUR CONVERSATION TO THE BUSINESS AT HAND. PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB US FOR NO REASON. SINCERELY: THE GAMAL SISTERS.” These women have no patience for the dilly-dallying or the gossip of their fellow townspeople. Instead, they are content—at least initially—to focus almost entirely on their work, “without ...

Though João Gilberto Noll has published nearly twenty books, Quiet Creature on the Corner is his first to be translated into English (by the talented Dr. Adam Morris). A five-time recipient of Brazil’s prestigious Prêmio Jabuti, Noll lives in Porto Alegre, which also happens to be the hometown of Quiet Creature’s narrator—an unemployed poet who finds himself in jail for raping his young neighbor, Mariana. But then, in a bizarre sequence of events, the poet is soon removed from jail and carted to the Almanova Clinic before then being moved yet again, this time to the mysterious household of Kurt, ...

Proust creates a time and place that is both familiar and palpable. Saer does nothing of the sort: a fictional village with a dramatized horizon overcast with pervasive isolation. And yet, it’s an equally genuine exploration of the difficulties of talking about the past, “where no one ever goes” (an obviously ironic claim for a memoir). “The past is a foreign country,” in the famous opening sentence of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Betweens, “they do things differently there.” The Clouds, beautifully, warns us there might not be a “there” to turn back to at all. For Saer, who stayed in ...

Viola Di Grado, an exciting new Italian literary voice, begins her novel Hollow Heart with this sentence: In 2011, the world ended: I killed myself. In fact, the book is narrated by a dead woman, Dorotea, who describes exactly how she killed herself and why (she drowned herself in the bathtub after a romantic breakup). Then Dorotea, a grad student living in Catania, Sicily, draws the reader into life after life with a dark, daring approach that attests to Di Grado’s penchant for innovation and invention ...

There are (supposedly) only two types of narratives. The first is the story of a person going on a journey. The second, a kind of inverse of the first, is the story of a stranger who comes to town. Whether or not you subscribe to this idea of only two narrative types (I, personally, do not), the journey narrative is one of the oldest and most human stories in all of literature. And because “the journey” is such a familiar kind of story, those novels, stories, or memoirs that take that motif and spin it in new and interesting directions ...

Elliott Chaze's novel Black Wings Has My Angel explores a brilliant but fatal partnership between two criminals bent on committing the perfect heist. “Tim Sunblade”—not his real name—escapes prison with nothing but his wits and a foolproof plan for a high-end robbery. His first week back in civilian life, he hires Virginia, a “ten-dollar tramp” who is not only more than what he paid for, but more than he bargained for. “What I wanted was a big stupid commercial blob of a woman; not a slender poised thing with skin the color of pearls melted in honey.” It isn't exactly ...

Don’t Think, Burgin’s newest collection of short stories (and his nineteenth book), is one of his very best. The author’s straightforward and suspense-driven storytelling voice is as compelling as ever, the stories somewhat spooky and darkly comic. They give you the willies and keep you coming back for more. But Burgin, in this latest collection, demonstrates a new empathy for his characters. This notable evolution gives the characters softer landings and a fuller resonance in the reader’s imagination ...

The magic of discovery presses against the melancholy of the ruins. We are like a pair of naturalists who’ve discovered a lost link in the evolutionary chain, a last survivor of a species thought extinct. Evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, in his new book, Half-Earth, calls this the “Lord God moment.” We find a wooden trunk with “A.H. Whetstone” and her address thick-inked by a nineteenth century hand, a plastic portable church organ keyboard in the springhouse, a carpet of rust growing on a Zenith turntable tangled in the weeds outside. Water rushes through the handsome stone channel of the ...

Bestiality, child abuse, love, depression, heartbreak: these are among the many subjects brought to life in Naja Marie Aidt’s story collection, Baboon. Aidt, born in Greenland, a resident of Brooklyn, writes in the intersection, the most dangerous part of the street. Her stories stand boldly in the overlap of the ordinary and the absurd, between the wondrous and the vile. Brave and masterful, it’s no wonder Aidt has won both the Pen Literary Award and the Nordic Council Literature Prize ...

In one devastating visual from the 2011 British television miniseries The Promise, a veteran of the Israeli armed forces shows the unaware protagonist the tragedy of the border between Israel and Palestine. As the series progresses—switching between the present time and that time which the protagonist’s grandfather spent in Post-WWII Israel as a British peacekeeper—the pathos of this divide becomes mired in historical and social realities beyond obvious resolution. This quagmire of a divided land is a familiar theme for our time. Ukrainian physicist-cum-entrepreneur-cum-author Alexei Nikitin’s novel YT specifically reminds us of the case of his country, whose Maidan revolution ...

Although I have never personally met Miriam Graham, I learned everything about her that I could possibly wish in what is her debut (and hopefully only) novel, Fortune’s Fate, forthcoming this August from Unreal Imprints. As a veteran reviewer, I no longer assess a book by its contents. (All of the best authors are dead, except for TuPac.) Instead, I take a long, hard look at the author's bio. The bio is the hardest thing to write—harder than a 100,000 word novel—and reveals more than most writers intend. Graham congratulates herself on her participation in several mid-tier workshops (tuition, not ...

Rachel May’s The Benedictines opens like a film. There’s are white-capped mountains and rolling hills, narrowing into focus on a Benedictine school campus where our narrator, Annie James, teaches writing. It’s on this campus where we tour her emotional landscape, as she struggles to understand her relationships with others, as well as her own religious faith, within the structure of Benedictine life. Told through a series of vignettes, we puzzle together Annie’s life at the school, where she sits at a remove from those around her. We slowly learn about her students, her “Devout Roommate,” some of her suitors, the ...

Little can mirror the hyper-exaggerated, hypersexual imagination of Jonathan Barrow’s On the Run with Mary—an engaging picaresque with perversely comic undertones. To be sure, this rendition of the 20th century is definitely not for the faint of heart and far from your run-of-the-mill coming-of-age story. Don’t expect any topic to be off-limits as you join a young, jaded schoolboy as he flees from an elitist English boarding school to brave the streets of 1960s London. Befriending a talking 34-year-old dachshund named Mary, the narrator navigates a luckless, schizophrenic world of substance abuse, evil headmasters, bodily excrement, and sexual licentiousness. Dead ...

Virility—that most male of virtues—is the heart of American war literature; Stephen Crane’s Henry Fleming learns patriotism in the face of bullets, Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim explores his sexual energy amidst the Dresden Bombing, and Tim O’Brien’s Jimmy Cross is both distracted and driven by his hometown romance. There isn’t much virility in Maroun, the twitchy and vaguely traumatized narrator of Rabee Jabar’s Confessions, however. That’s probably attributable to the hydra that was Lebanon’s Civil War, around which the novel circles. And circles. And circles. And while the spiral, as it too often does, must end somewhere, you can be ...

A MAN LIES DREAMING by Lavie Tidhar Melville House, 294 pages reviewed by Kylie Lee Baker When a novel opens the gates of Auschwitz, we expect to be moved by a tale we've heard a hundred times before; we expect to see Eli Wiesel searching for his father's emaciated body in the snow; we wait for Oskar Schindler to brush snow from his car and then realize that it is not snow but the ashes of burned bodies; above all, we anticipate a tale that unites us in our hatred of Nazi Germany and makes us weep for the injustices ...

A School for Fools does not immediately strike a modern reader as new or groundbreaking; its central premise is that the narrator, a male youth attending a school for the insane, is unreliable, territory well-tread by canonized authors and Intro-to-Fiction students alike. Perhaps the original novel by Sasha Sokolov preceded (or at least coincided with the origin of) the pervasive cliché of the asylum story, having first been published in 1976, but a reader of this new translation by Alexander Boguslawski can hardly be blamed for her skepticism after glancing at the book’s back-cover blurb. As the asylum motif becomes ...

From Rachel Cantor, the lauded author of the 2014 novel A Highly Unlikely Scenario, comes a novel of New Life, a journey of personal resurrection, Good on Paper. Much of the novel is a meditation on fidelity, in relationships and in translations, and it brings to the page some of the most interesting personalities and family dynamics so far this year in literature. The characters and their relationships make this story of literary delight: Shira, the protagonist, a translator and single mother; Ahmad, her gay best friend and co-parent; Andi, her young and sharp daughter; Romei, the illustrious, Nobel prizing-winning ...

Like the best coming-of-age stories, Christopher Kloeble’s Almost Everything Very Fast addresses universal concerns by asking personal questions. Nineteen-year-old Albert, raised in an orphanage, wants to know why he was given up by his anonymous mother and the father he knows: Frederick Arkadiusz Driajes, a grown man with a childlike mind. Albert has gotten nowhere by following the “Hansel and Gretel crumbs” he’s found in Fred’s attic: a photo of Fred with a red-haired woman, a few auburn hairs plucked from a comb. When Fred’s terminal illness imposes an urgent deadline, Albert visits him in Königsdorf one last time—but his ...

THE LAST WEYNFELDT by Martin Suter translated by Steph Morris New Vessel Press, 302 pages reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer Martin Suter’s The Last Weynfeldt is an impressive work of intrigue and beauty. It sparks at the intersection of two very different people, Adrian Weynfeldt, mid-fifties, internationally renowned art expert, and Lorena, a shoplifting, small-time model who rips Adrian from his carefully crafted still life. Adrian earns his living by putting a “fair” price on beauty, authenticity, and originality. Lorena, often an anonymous commodity as a model, is also a thief, a woman who never pays society’s agreed upon price. And ...

HERE COME THE DOGS by Omar Musa The New Press, 330 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster You had to be there. Right? That's how these things work—the magic of moments strung together, a shared lexicon, the bond of shared origins. Omar Musa's brilliant first novel Here Come The Dogs unpicks the rough, multifaceted hip-hop culture of small-town Australia. Immediate and compelling, this one deserves a place on the shelf next to Trainspotting or The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Both a snapshot of a specific time and place, and an examination of the broadness of humanity, Here Come The Dogs ...

A HAND REACHED DOWN TO GUIDE ME by David Gates Alfred A. Knopf, 336 pages reviewed by Jeanne Bonner A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me is a short story collection that offers a rare pleasure: the possibility of reading it cover to cover, leaping from one story to the next. Some readers, including this one, may want to protest the gallery of rogue characters David Gates presents in this new collection perhaps enough to wonder who Gates hangs out with. I’m reminded of the scene from the film Ocean’s 11 when Julie Roberts’ character says to George Clooney, who ...

CONSEQUENCES: Four Books in Translation reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin WAR, SO MUCH WAR by Mercè Rodoreda, translation by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennant Open Letter, 185 pages TRISTANO DIES by Antonio Tabucchi, translation by Elizabeth Harris Archipelago, 192 pages THE THINGS WE DON’T DO by Andrés Neuman, translation by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia Open Letter, 190 pages A GENERAL THEORY OF OBLIVION by José Eduardo Agualusa Archipelago, 246 pages Once in a while a writer speaks to me as if we are in a kind of private ecstatic embrace. That is the kind of reader I am: thirsty for ...

STUMBLING OUT THE STABLE by Sean Pravica Pelekinesis Press, 436 pages reviewed by KC Mead-Brewer In his short stories, Sean Pravica often prefers the magical real and the weird over realism. In his debut novel Stumbling Out the Stable, however, Pravica steps up to a more classic literary endeavor: to find (and not shy away from) meaning in the everyday. For Pravica’s characters in Stumbling, this “meaning” is found between the gods of order and chaos—not simply in their conflicts, but in the strange beauty of their creative harmony. The novel crackles with the nervous energy of this crossroads between ...

FAT CITY by Leonard Gardner introduction by Denis Johnson New York Review Books, 191 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster We steal. Writers do. A good writer is a magpie, searching other people's sentences for something that glimmers. A good writer reads with a jeweler's loupe. Close reading, and the willingness to borrow shamelessly from other people's works, is what differentiates the casual writer from the serious writer. Very serious writers find other writers' reading lists, and read them. And then those writers' lists, their influences. And so on back. Read up the chain. Understanding what a writer reads, and ...

KIDS IN THE WIND by Brad Wethern Red Hen Press, 146 pages reviewed by Rachael Tague Randy Ray McKenzie received the nickname General Custer because Junior Malstrom always thought Randy was galloping Strawberry, the one-eyed horse, into disaster. And perhaps, on the day General Custer agreed to race the old horse against a junkyard Ford on a rarely used, viciously windy airstrip in the California seaport town of Fairhaven, he was indeed galloping into disaster – or at least over the edge of a sand dune. The General moved to Fairhaven in the middle of second grade, which “is like ...

TALK by Linda Rosenkrantz NYRB, 215 pages reviewed by Rory McCluckie Whatever else it might be, Talk is the bearer of a remarkably terse and comprehensive title. Has there ever been a work that so accurately summarizes its contents in so short a space? In four letters, Linda Rosenkrantz encapsulated the interior of her 1968 literary experiment immaculately; this is a book of talk. All 215 pages are repositories of speech, unadorned by scenic description or third-person agency. What's more, they're pages of genuine talk, not a word of it imagined or fabricated. Over the summer of 1965, Rosenkrantz decided ...

KILLING AUNTIE by Andrzej Bursa translated by Wiesiek Powaga New Vessel Press, 107 pages reviewed by Jacqueline Kharouf Andrzej Bursa was born in Krakow on March 21, 1932, seven years before the German invasion of Poland. He died of congenital heart failure at age twenty-five on November 15, 1957, just after Poland began to overthrow its totalitarian system of Communist rule. Bursa lived in a time that shifted dramatically from extreme suppression to extreme expression, misinformation and propaganda to jazz and poetry. His literary career began on the heels of the post-war period of Polish literature noted for an emphasis ...

THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE TIME STOOD STILL, novelas by Bohumil Hrabal translated by James Naughton NYRB Classics, 299 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Late summer might be the best season to read Bohumil Hrabal, for time reveals itself in the ripe air and everything bleeds with life. Hrabal, the Czech novelist of delirious syncopation, who died in 1997 falling from a fifth floor hospital window while trying to feed the birds, returns to childhood in these two novelas about the manager of a small-town brewery, his older brother, savage wife, and young son. Hrabal’s stepfather was the manager of a ...

THE WAKE by Paul Kingsnorth Graywolf Press, 365 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster As I write this, the white half of the world is up in arms about a lion, killed on the other side of the globe. Black protestors in Ferguson stand in lines, chanting the names of the dead. Videos are released of police officers assaulting, maiming, and shooting unarmed black citizens. The temperature soars to 165 degrees in Iran. This summer has been too hot, a climate sweating for change. It is the oldest story: the new idea comes, and grinds the good old world into ...

THE TREE WITH NO NAME by Drago Jançar translated by Michael Biggins Dalkey Archive, 274 pages reviewed by Justin Goodman Contention over millennials’ degree of entitlement hasn’t been limited to the United States. As we learn from Slovenian writer Drago Jançar, in fact, the generation gap has an equally special significance in the former Soviet Bloc, where, according to translator Erica Johnson Debeljak, writing on the Dalkey Archive Press website, the “new generation…takes independence and freedom, the Slovenian language, and shopping malls to be their birthright.” Communism is outdated. That’s why The Tree With No Name is so timely. The ...

THE PAPER MAN by Gallagher Lawson Unnamed Press, 267 pages REMEMBER THE SCORPION by Isaac Goldemberg translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Tittler Unnamed Press, 133 pages THE FINE ART OF FUCKING UP by Cate Dicharry Unnamed Press, 230 pages ESCAPE FROM BAGHDAD by Saad Z. Hossain Unnamed Press, 304 pages reviewed by Johnny Payne The wryly-named Unnamed Press out of Los Angeles is living the self-appointed paradox of making a name for itself. Any independent press walks the line between sufficient eclecticism to draw in a swath of curious readers, and a strong enough identity to stand out from ...

HAW by Sean Jackson Harvard Square Editions, 181 pages reviewed by Michelle Fost Sean Jackson’s first novel, Haw, recently out from Harvard Square Editions, is an ecological nightmare narrative, the story of a world starved for clean water. When I first came across Jackson’s writing in his short story “How a Ghost Is Made” (in Issue 7 of Cleaver) I was impressed by Jackson’s snappy, lean prose style. In “How a Ghost Is Made,” Jackson portrays a woman who is in the process of pulling away from the husband who is cheating on her. We first encounter Shelly while she ...

A HISTORY OF MONEY by Alan Pauls translated by Ellie Robins Melville House, 197 pages reviewed by Rory McCluckie There has never been a time when the subject of money wasn't fertile ground for a work of literature; whatever view you take on its role in our lives, it's central to them. From the economic policies of governments to the spare change tossed into a busker's guitar case, it's difficult to imagine what life without it might look like. Not a bad subject, then, for a work that is set to catapult its author onto the international stage. Alan Pauls ...

COUP DE FOUDRE A Novella and Stories by Ken Kalfus Bloomsbury Press, 277 pages reviewed by Carolyn Daffron Ken Kalfus is an audacious stylist, whose stories and novels often invoke the likes of Borges, Calvino, Golgol, and Saramago. His choice of subject matter can be equally fearless: cosmology, 9-11, and the grand sweep of Russian history, to name only a few. Coup de Foudre, the novella which forms the centerpiece of his most recent collection of short fiction, is a coruscating example of this gutsiness and high literary ambition. Not that I enjoyed reading it, at least not the first ...

THE LAST FLIGHT OF POXL WEST by Daniel Torday St. Martin’s Press, 291 pages reviewed by Michelle Fost In Daniel Torday’s debut novel The Last Flight of Poxl West, two first-person tales wrap around each other. This intertwining is in itself fascinating, especially given that one of the strands is an account of a man who repeatedly pulls away from those he feels closest to, seemingly unable to sustain intimate connections. Torday begins the novel in the voice of Eli Goldstein, a Boston-area teenager who bears witness to the literary rise and fall of his adopted uncle, Poxl West. Eli ...

THE SILVER SWAN by Elena Delbanco Other Press, 240 pages reviewed by Hannah Judd Elena Delbanco’s father was Bernard Greenhouse, cellist in the Beaux Arts Trio, and in this first novel full of musicians her lived experience brings authority to her descriptions. Her focus is on a father, Alexander, a famous cellist but distant man, and his daughter, Mariana, also a cellist, poised to follow in his footsteps as a soloist but derailed by crippling stage fright and an unhappy love affair. The cello promised to her since childhood, her father’s, is unexpectedly not left to her in his will: ...

ALEXANDRIAN SUMMER by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren translated by Yardenne Greenspan New Vessel Press, 171 pages reviewed by Justin Goodman "The Irony of Nostalgia" From our Modernist forebears came an emphasis on the power of memory (think Marcel Proust). Yet they forgot to mention its overbearing sibling, nostalgia. Overbearing not only because it tends to act as “a screen not intended to hide anything–a decoration meant only to please the eye,” but also because it obscures history. In effect, it fetishizes the past. It makes Alexandria the “strange, nostalgic European landscape” of Yitzhak Gormezano Goren’s Alexandrian Summer (translated for the first ...

I REFUSE by Per Petterson translated by Don Bartlett Graywolf Press, 282 pages reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster The fact is that part of you is always fifteen, and will always be that silly, stunted age, when you had all the answers and your heart was folded as neatly as a napkin. The age when you sampled cigarettes and realized how easy it would be to run away from home, for good. The age when the drink or the drug worked, for the first time, altering the way you saw yourself and the rest of the messy, stimulating world. The ...

TROMPE L’OEIL by Nancy Reisman Tin House Books, 352 pages reviewed by Michelle Fost Does a good life play out like a well made film? Nancy Reisman has published two excellent books—a prize-winning collection of stories, House Fires (it won the Iowa Award for Short Fiction in 1999) and a novel, The First Desire. Now her second novel, just published by Tin House, Trompe L’Oeil, comes along and almost tricks the eye to thinking it is about a real family, or perhaps about what we can learn from a carefully curated assemblage of painters (descriptive response to their work is ...

ENDING UP by Kingsley Amis NYRB Classics, 136 pages reviewed by Jon Busch Originally published in 1974, Kingsley Amis’ short novel Ending Up is about five old-timers approaching death in England. It is a startlingly funny work, considering the grim subject. I was initially apprehensive about this book, wary that my limited knowledge of English culture would hinder my ability to understand an English work of social satire, but happily this was not the case nor should it be a worry for any reader. Amis’ concerns in the book, while presented through British characters, are predominantly human in scope. The ...

ASHES IN MY MOUTH, SAND IN MY SHOES by Per Petterson translated by Don Bartlett Graywolf Press, 118 pages reviewed by Rory McCluckie Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes is Per Petterson's first book but one of his last to be translated into English. This isn't surprising; Petterson's 2005 worldwide breakthrough, Out Stealing Horses, triggered a certain catching-up period for translators. Gradually, we readers have been able to consume the bulk of his output but it's only now that we can see for ourselves where it all started for the author. This means that readers are able to ...

THE SEA by Blai Bonet translated by and Maruxa Relano and Martha Tennent Dalkey Archive Press, 178 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Manuel Tur, sixteen years old and confined to tubercular sanatorium, stares out his window at the forested plane. He fixes his gaze on the holm oaks and the olive trees. This is Majorca, the Catalan island, 1942. “To the west,” he says, at the opening of Blai Bonet’s 1958 novel The Sea (El Mar), in the new English version published by Dalkey Archive Press, “the sky is hazy, blue, tender, like an open switchblade above the sea.” Bonet’s ...

GUYS LIKE ME by Dominique Fabre translated by Howard Curtis New Vessel Press, 144 pages reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin Dominique Fabre has written a dozen novels, including the 2005 The Waitress Was New, which Archipelago Books brought out in English translation in 2008. New Vessel Press publisher Ross Ufberg attended a reading at Shakespeare and Company in Paris and decided to publish an English edition of Fabre’s next novel, Guys Like Me, in the translation by Howard Curtis. Both novels are narrated by middle-aged protagonists, once married, now single and lonely. “Sometimes you’re so alone you think you’re talking aloud ...

TESLA: A PORTRAIT WITH MASKS by Vladimir Pištalo translated by Bogdan Rakić and John Jeffries Graywolf Press, 452 pages reviewed by Rory McCluckie One of the most illuminating moments in Vladimir Pištalo's biographical novel, Tesla: A Portrait with Masks, comes not when the protagonist is immersed in the electrical discoveries for which he became famous, but when he is translating poetry. Searching for an English equivalent to the Serbian phrase crammed in, he pauses his contemplations to offer an observation: “On the outside, Serbian looks like such a tiny language,” he opines to his collaborator and friend, Robert Underwood Johnson; ...