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From Stephen Elliott
Initially published in Portugal in 1976, Manual of Painting and Calligraphy is one of Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago’s first novels. He was fifty-four when he wrote it, and had spent most of life, as our translator Giovanni Pontiero puts it, doing “various manual jobs.”
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Rejected by the early Soviet state, Sigizmund Krhizhanovsky published only nine stories in his lifetime; luckily his novel The Letter Killers Club is now available in English.
Lizzy Acker’s first book of stories Monster Party depicts lost adults, drifting into the coming storm.
The Avian Gospels is a strange, compelling parable about an authoritarian city-state, an underground resistance, and a plague of mysterious birds.
Gregory Orfalea’s collection of linked stories demonstrates that conventions are there for a reason—and it’s often harder to follow the rules than to break them.
In Don LePan’s dystopian novel, the animals are all extinct and the weaker people have taken their place in the food chain.
Ali Shaw’s novel concerns a modern-day Midas, a cold and inhospitable island, and a young woman whose body is inexorably transforming.
Lori Ostlund masters the sadness of breakups, the empty inevitability of doors closing: “For at each turn, the people we hold close elude us.”
A first novel set in modern Zimbabwe begins: “Two days after I turned fourteen the son of our neighbor set his stepmother alight.”
Spanish author Javier Calvo’s novel critiques pop culture by embracing its stereotypes
Laleh Khadivi’s novel traces the history of Iran through the brutal journey of a young Kurd
Second Place in the Rumpus College Book Review Contest
Apparently it’s now possible, forty years after the first release of The Book of Flights, to see experimental fiction—like Marxism, feminism, political protests and disco—as a mildly embarrassing historical quirk.
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