Author: Anca Szilagyi

Dear Lucy

Dear Lucy

Dear Lucy Julie Sarkissian Simon & Schuster, April 2013 340 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,…

the cover of "Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me"

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…

cover of Town of Shadows

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…

Cover of Mr. Penumbra's Bookstore by Robin Sloan

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…

Cover art for Come In and Cover Me by Gin Phillips

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…

Cover art for From the Conservatory by Julio Cortazar

From the Observatory

From the Observatory Julio Cortázar Trans. Anne McLean Archipelago Books, August 2011 130 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…

Cover art for Wunderkind by Nikolai Grozni

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…