Reviews
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Toteninsel in English
New in English, Gerhard Meier’s 1979 Isle of the Dead recalls W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn as two friends traverse their town, discussing nature and death in elegant prose.
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Books as Fetish Objects
Unpacking My Library introduces a new sub-genre to coffee table books: library porn.
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What Part Are You Now?
Harrison’s style is spare and evocative, more expressive than Hemingway but less misogynistic, more accessible than Thoreau. Honest.
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Against an Ethical Machine
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.
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It’s Pigsty I
Nomura plays with language in radical and diverse ways, employing subtleties of rhythm, semantics, image, gender, punctuation, and repetition, often all within the same short stanza.
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Light
New in English, Andrzej Stasiuk’s novel Dukla is more of a verbal painting than a novel, but his exquisite descriptions are worth the reader’s work.
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Death of an Author
Edouard Levé’s Suicide, a slim, declarative, idea-driven novel, is daring and raw, and packed full of rewards for any reader willing to take a wide step outside of the American mainstream.
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O Circular Philosopher
The field is integral, too, to Dan Beachy-Quick’s Circle’s Apprentice—the field of vision, field of the empty page and of the populated page, field of self/ body/maker, absence of field. It is from these fields that Beachy-Quick enters into a…
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Grossman’s Magnum Opus
In his latest novel, To the End of the Land, Israeli novelist David Grossman encapsulates the magical thinking of a country that could easily not exist.
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You Weren’t Born By Yourself
In Touch, Cole once again breaks into new territories of form, subject, and voice, channeling pleasure and pain into a collection of poems that triumphs in the face of their inseparability.
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A Really Good and Interesting Book
The ineffable David Shrigley has a new book of drawings out, appropriately titled What the Hell Are You Doing?
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The Surreal Nature of Real Life
Edited and illustrated by Arthur Jones, Post-It Note Diaries collects 20 mundane but evocative tales by storytellers ranging from Chuck Klosterman to Andrew Bird.