In English for the first time, Nescio’s Amsterdam Stories retrace timeless youthful abandon with mature yet doleful emotional detachment. …more

With an experiment in form, Mark Leyner’s latest novel The Sugar Frosted Nutsack turns the exploits of a nobody into the stuff of whacked-out folklore. …more

There is dissonance here between expectation and want, a dichotomy as digestible as life and death, or heaven and earth

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From these two new books, the reader can gather that it isn’t just the day that is strong and can withstand change, but the same words can be applied to the speakers of these poems and to Myles herself. …more

In Jeff Sharlet’s latest book about religion in America, Sweet Heaven When I Die, “religion” is something protean and heterodox. …more

As if to heed Hecate’s rebuke, to show the dire glory of her art, Szporluk’s poems speak with a voice unhinged by an unyielding despair. Teeming with submerged violence and opaque anger, they swirl, futile, in the face of our helpless human finitude, “our speck of pig-universe.”

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In her debut novel, Threats, Amelia Gray is coy about plot in deference to the beauty and urgency of people’s thoughts. …more

Kevin Moffett’s Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events is one of the most delightful collections in recent memory. …more

But even here, vertigo and ambivalence dominate, and I find myself searching the poems for the kinetic energy of a walker in the city; heel marks and muddy droplets. I want to overhear conversations on the streets.

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The Flight of Gemma Hardy and Death Comes to Pemberly both attempt to pay homage to nineteenth century novelists, but the translation is not always apt. …more

With its host of defunct genomes, a rupturing cosmos, malevolent gods, a derelict body politic, and endless war, the poems in this collection act as harbingers of the wasteland America may soon become.

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The latest novel from infant terrible Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory sits in his oeuvre as a less-cruel, poignant romp through familiar themes. …more

Heidi Julavits’ latest novel The Vanishers is provocative and full of hefty, even academic ideas—at its best, a nouveau feminist manifesto. …more

It is clear from Dove’s introduction to the anthology, and from her selections, that she just wanted an engaging, informative, high -quality collection. She succeeded.

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At its best, After the Point of No Return gives us just what we hope to find: poems that wrestle with mortality, retrace the steps of a life, and take us past the limit of flesh into whatever comes next.

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Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories illustrates the haphazard, psychological violence of a century of ideology, disruption, and the search for the meaning of personal freedom. …more

Tupelo Hassman’s debut Girlchild is an emotionally rich and complex picture of a smart girl brutalized and circumscribed by circumstances. …more

In this collection, Chaple successfully fuses the personal with the spatial. As a result, an awareness of the way poems, by airing out the rooms of stanzas, can provide at once solace and disarray comes into terrible focus.

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A collaboration between novelist Jessica Anthony and designer Rodrigo Corral yields a novel that makes our hearts move faster than our brains. …more

In her novel Angel, Elizabeth Taylor turns the exploration of the relationship of the artist to her imagination, her drive, her self-opinion, her ego, on its ear. …more

The emotional theme of the volume, the nostalgia and death that is announced in the book’s title and reaffirmed in almost every poem to some extent, is what I know I will carry with me for a long time.

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Lysley Tenorio’s linked short story collection, Monstress, organically ties together stories of the misfits and outcasts of both the Philippines and Southern California. …more

Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom could fit neatly into any number of contemporary-sounding categories: hybrid text, art book, lyric essay, etc. It is a book that relies on interdependence of image and text, of history and the present, of evocation and concrete image.

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Ellen Ullman’s throbbing new novel, By Blood, tells the story of an eavesdropping neighbor with a compulsive attention to sound. …more

Christina Alger’s debut The Darlings follows the Darling family headed by a billionaire financier through the financial crisis. Luckily, these rich people are really screwed up. …more

Especially for a reader coming to Trakl for the first time, Firmage’s accessible introduction and organization of the poems provide an excellent overview of Trakl’s development as a poet and the range of work he produced.

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Often, in contemporary literature, grief becomes clichéd; O’Rourke, however, avoids sappiness or melodrama. Instead, her poetry probes at the actualization of grief, revealing a startling emotional depth.

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In a complex story about two anitpodal women, Deborah Scroggins delivers answers in Wanted Women: Faith, Lies & the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali & Aafia Siddiqui. …more

Used well, the collective perspective affords the poet a wider voice, a surer sense. The reader feels present in these moments of ruin, trusting even the more fantastical occurrences.

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Both rhetorically playful and plot driven, Tom McCarthy’s first novel, Men in Space, now out in the U.S., floats in between his other novels Remainder and C. …more