Down the Rabbit Hole Juan Pablo Villalobos FSG Originals, October 2012 96 pages $12.00 When a writer makes a child the narrator of literary fiction, a certain amount of pretension has to be involved. After all, in order to handle the existential and symbolic weight of the story, the child will need to be unusually…
Narcopolis Jeet Thayil Penguin Press, April 2012 304 pages $25.95 It’s dangerous to look for the reincarnation of a classic novel in contemporary literature. Like a monk seeking the next in the line of a particular lama, I placed the various relics of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano before first time novelist Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis,…
The Letter Killers ClubSigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (Trans. Joanne Turnbull)New York Review Books Classics, December 2011144 pages$14.00 Separating the mysteries of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s own story from those within the stories he published is a difficult task, especially when, in the case of The Letter Killers Club, written in 1920’s Soviet Russia, he deliberately built those stories within…
The Seamstress and the Wind César Aira New Directions, June 2011 144 pages $12.95 César Aira is a deconstructed Kafka; a compact, comprehensible Roberto Bolaño obsessed with the frightening nonsense of civilization. The latter comparison terrifies academic readers, because if Bolano is made compact and comprehensible, how can they pretend to be the only ones who…
The Ice Trilogy Vladimir Sorokin (Translated by Jamey Gambrell) New York Review of Books, March 2011 704 pages $19.95 The Ice Trilogy, a newly translated work of fiction by Vladimir Sorokin, tells the tale of the 20th century’s tragedies and triumphs through the eccentric and abrasive narratives of—to be charitable—a cult of assholes. At the…
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