Author: Anca Szilagyi

  • Dear Lucy

    Dear LucyJulie SarkissianSimon & Schuster, April 2013340 pages$25.00 Genre: literary fiction, debut. Concerning: Lucy, a young woman whose different way of seeing and behaving has compelled her image-conscious, frustrated mother, Mum mum, to abandon her on a farm. And: Samantha, a pregnant teenager on the same farm. And: Missus and Mister, their caretakers. (And later,…

  • Marbles

    Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, & Me Ellen Forney Gotham Books, November 2012 241 pages $20.00 Genre: Graphic Memoir Concerning: Cartoonist Ellen Forney’s confrontation with her bipolar disorder diagnosis And: what it means for her identity as an artist And: what it means for her creativity and her livelihood Compelling questions explored: “How could I keep…

  • Town of Shadows

    Town of Shadows Lindsay Stern Scrambler Books, 2012 96 pages $12 What: a debut prose-poem novella Who: the eponymous town of shadows And: its cast of shadowy characters, including a rug doctor, a lepidopterist, bureaucrats, a bodiless mayor speaking from a gramophone that sputters ash, a child with an hour glass and a white balloon…

  • Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

    Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore Robin Sloan Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2012 288 pages $25.00 What: a book about books And: their simultaneous demise and triumph And, obviously: immortality Who: Clay Jannon, night shift clerk at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore And: his quest to understand Mr. Penumbra’s bizarre and cultish dealings And: his desire to…

  • Minuet For Guitar

    Minuet For Guitar (In Twenty-Five Shots) Vitomil Zupan, trans. Harry Leeming Dalkey Archive, December 2011 400 pages $23.95 Scope: microscopic to galactic Tones: philosophical, dark, sarcastic With: tiny flecks of the bucolic Concerning: Slovenian partisan Berk, fighting in World War II As well as: former German soldier Joseph Bitter, meeting Berk at a Spanish resort…

  • Come In and Cover Me

    Come In and Cover Me Gin Phillips Riverhead Books, January 2012 342 pages $26.95 “What did people do when they abandoned their center? Did they create a new thing altogether, or did they cling to old habits?” Silas Cooper, an archaeologist in Gin Phillips’s second novel, Come In and Cover Me, asks these questions about…

  • From the Observatory

    From the ObservatoryJulio CortázarTrans. Anne McLeanArchipelago Books, August 2011130 pages$18.00 The first time I read Julio Cortázar’s From the Observatory, I thought I’d succumbed to a fever-dream. Eels slip, muscularly, into Möbius strips; the night is red-haired and the marble cold. I had no idea what I was reading or where I was, and I…

  • Wunderkind

    Wunderkind Nikolai Grozni Free Press, September 2011 289 pages $24.00 Anger, sarcasm, and longing fuel Nikolai Grozni’s autobiographical novel Wunderkind, set in the late 1980s in a communist Sofia that is stony, backlit red. Crows and ravens populate a landscape overwhelmed with death; necrologies are tacked to trees and walls; and the embalmed corpse of…