For a printable PDF to bring to your local library, click here.

The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector
Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: June 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0811219686
Paperback, $15.95

Água Viva by Clarice Lispector
Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: June 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0811219907
Paperback, $14.95

Clarice Lispector is widely seen as Brazil’s great novelist, and this summer New Directions is delivering four new editions and translations of Lispector’s best work. Água Viva is the strangest and most experimental of the quartet. It lacks plot or characters in any traditional sense, but it nonetheless manages to create a feeling of drama and urgency. It is difficult to describe what it is about, but roughly it is about a woman meditating on the difference between painting and writing and what it means to live and create in the world. The Passion According to G.H. is a more traditional novel relative to Água Viva, but it is far from traditional. Without giving anything away, the short description is that it is a thoughtful, philosophical novel about the death of a cockroach. These books are amazing and should (finally) elevate Lispector into the American conversation about the best writers of Latin America.

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Between Page and Screen by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse
Publisher: Siglio Press
Publication Date: April, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9799562-8-7
Paperback, $24.95

Someone once said that since the 1990s, content as a realm of possible experimentation in literature has been exhausted, leaving form the final sandbox for writers to play and build in. If this is the case, Between Page and Screen is a significant movement in this trajectory: a kind of “digital pop-up book,” the book itself contains no text, only a series of black and white rune-like geometric patterns that, when displayed in a computer’s webcam to the online program at www.betweenpageandscreen.com, have poetry extracted from them. You watch yourself holding the book in the flash window on the webpage: the words — sometimes moving, sometimes still; a collection of cryptic love letters, shifting phrases, and combinations of letters rotating and looping back upon themselves — appear to float above each sigil, exploding in a cloud of text with the turn of each page. Borsuk and Bouse have created a wonderful new infrastructure for digital literature which, hopefully, future writers will continue to exploit and further build upon.

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Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra
Publisher: Melville House
Publication Date: October 2008; Reissue, November 2011
ISBN: 9781933633626
Paperback, $13.00

How do writers pull off such brilliant debut novels? Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai is a precocious, melancholy story of love between two university students — or more accurately, between two university students and their shared love for literature — and reading Zambra, one gets the impression that literature permeates the lives of Chileans in a way that North Americans cannot experience. Scarcely three years old, it has already been accepted with enthusiasm into the Chilean literary canon (alongside such renowned authors as Roberto Bolaño, Isabel Allende, and Ariel Dorfman) and adapted to film by director Cristián Jiménez. It is for the release of the film that Melville House has reissued this 2008 novel originally printed in their “Contemporary Art of the Novella” series, and it is for publishing this fantastic little novel that we yet again declare our love for Melville House as one of our favorite American publishers.

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Antigonick by Anne Carson
Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: May 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0811219570
Hardcover, $24.95

Anne Carson’s last book was the hauntingly beautiful Nox, a poem/eulogy/scrap-book/collage built around her translation of a poem by Catullus and printed as a sprawling accordion fold. Her latest is a translation and radical retelling of the classic Greek tragedy Antigone, which in her treatment is called Antigonick. Joining Carson’s often hilarious text are incredible illustrations by Bianca Stone. The text is hand drawn as well, making the book an art object as well as a phenomenal text. This is Sophocles as you have never seen him, and I hope someone performs this translation on stage. Carson is the rare combination of scholarly classicist and powerful poet, and each of her books feels both timely and eternal. Praise Calliope for Anne Carson and the gifts she has offered us!

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The Colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi
Publisher: Melville House
Publication Date: April, 2012
ISBN: 9781612191324
Paperback, $17.95

It is the dreariest rainy night imaginable in Tehran. A former colonel in the Shah’s army — discharged for murdering his wife in a bout of jealousy — is staring at a portrait of his dead son when two soldiers pull him from his house to inform him that his youngest daughter has been killed by hanging. He becomes sucked into a vortex of memories — of his late wife; of the tortures he endured in prison after murdering her; of meeting his eldest son Amir, an Iranian Communist Party member whose only friend is an ancient, immortal figure from the Quran, in that selfsame prison — while attempting to maintain composure enough to complete her burial rites. The Colonel emanates a quality of darkness rarely achieved by contemporary novelists — the characters move within a subtle yet horrifying surreality comparable only to Platonov or Kafka. This book is certainly not for the faint of heart — the nightmare recounted by Amir about 25 pages into the book was enough to make me queasy.

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Madame X by Darcie Dennigan
Publisher: Canarium Books
Publication Date: April, 2012
ISBN: 9780982237687
Paperback, $14.00

Madame X is Darcie Dennigan’s eagerly-awaited follow-up to her celebrated 2008 collection Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse and it has already found loads of well-deserved critical acclaim. Dennigan has a powerful command of language, and is not afraid to warp the form of poems in distinct, difficult, and effective ways. She has a knack for constructing poetic monologues in sets of conversational paragraphs, punctuated with extensive ellipses and words that reveal themselves through their absence, all saturated with a dark, skeletal humor. I’m immediately reminded of James Tate and Céline but set two thousand years in the future.

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I Am Your Slave Now What Do I Say by Anthony Madrid
Publisher: Canarium Books
Publication Date: April, 2012
ISBN: 9780984947102
Paperback, $14.00

Canarium Books is a Berkeley-based publisher of quality poetry, and we are so excited to be working with them. They make beautifully-designed paperback books that put other publishers to shame, and I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say, the bizarre and fascinating debut by Chicago poet Anthony Madrid, is certainly no exception. The poems are something like a series of lucid, impassioned rants, in a style informed by the “ghazal” — which, for uncultured barbarians like myself who aren’t familiar with this term, is an ancient Arabic poetic form consisting of at least five couplets (usually rhyming) and a refrain with the signature quality of containing the author’s name somewhere in the final couplet. The collection is iconoclastic, maddening, and a declaration of war on acquiescence and the patronizing attitudes of the learned — speaking in his own words, Madrid says: “You identify with Socrates and the Eleatic Stranger–but as for me, // I’m through with these wise men who smile and condescend.”

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Less Than Nothing by Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: Verso
Publication Date: May 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-1844678976
Hardcover, $69.95

If public libraries buy a large book of modern philosophy this year, let Slavoj Zizek’s Less Than Nothing be it. Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian academic celebrity known for both his provocative writing and eccentric public appearances, offers us his magnum opus. In all of this work, German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan loom large as his biggest influences. Less Than Nothing is Zizek’s ode to Hegel and an argument for Hegel’s continuing relevance in the 21st century (through Lacan, of course!). No other scholar could write a 1000 page book about Hegel that will appeal to a non-academic audience. The jokes, pop culture references, and flights of fancy that Zizek fans have come to know and love are all here in abundance, and readers who were drawn in by his recent popular works like Living in End Times or Violence can sink their teeth into the substance of Zizek’s intellectual project. The publication of Less Than Nothing is a major event in contemporary philosophy, and public libraries should be part of it.

For a printable PDF of the list to bring to your local library, click here.

A Very Minor Prophet by James Bernard Frost
Publisher: Hawthorne
Publication Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0983304982
Paperback, $19.95

As a teenager, I was part of the last generation of zine makers before the internet took over. We made cut-n-paste photocopied zines about traveling, punk rock, politics, and whatever else, and we kept up with each other via post rather than email or social networking websites. James Bernard Frost’s marvelous book is somewhere between a zine, a novel, and a religious gospel. Set in Portland, Oregon in the middle of the Bush years (2004), Frost tells the tale of a young man who falls in with a motley crew of messianic hard-drinking bike-punk zine makers. It’s a wild story drenched in (Stumptown) coffee and beer. It also has the best book cover of the year.

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The Lives of Things by José Saramago
Publisher: Verso
Publication Date: April 25, 2012
ISBN: 978-1844678785
Hardcover, $23.95

Nobel Prize winner Saramago died in 2010. For the first time in English, Verso brings us a collection of his short fiction. It goes without saying that the writing is fantastic. The style and imagination that would bring him international success in novels such as Blindness and All the Names are evident here. Even as a young writer, Saramago was a virtuoso. The most memorable story in this collection, The Chair, captures the end of the Salazar regime in Portugal. The only question one has after reading The Lives of Things is why it was not published sooner!

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Emmaus by Alessandro Baricco
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Publication Date: May 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1936365593
Hardcover, $22

Alessandro Baricco certainly has a strange set of credentials. 1) He holds degrees in philosophy and piano. 2) Originally a music critic, he published a book in 1998 about the relationship between modernity and music called Hegel’s Soul and the Cows of Wisconsin. 3) He has a number of ambitious theatrical pieces under his belt, including a rewriting of Homer’s “Iliad” divided into sections retold by prominent characters from the original work. 4) He’s the founder of a creative writing school which includes curriculum on writing video game plots. 5) He has directed a film about Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and collaborated on an album with the French electronic group Air. All of this on top of the fact that his novels Silk and City were met with critical acclaim makes his new novel, Emmaus, seem like a potentially daunting read — which may have been the case, if the book were not so approachable and engaging, not to mention darkly beautiful. A story of four boys growing up and becoming aware of the dissonance of modern Italian society, Emmaus is at heart a tale of youthful infatuation and friendship.

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Half in Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate by Judith Kitchen
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Publication Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1566892964
Paperback, $16

Novelist Judith Kitchen builds this beautiful memoir around the family photographs, scrapbooks, and letters she inherits, many of which are reproduced here. There is something wonderful about the way novelists construct history and memory. Kitchen has an extended conversation with her family history – Half in Shade came together over a decade – and the result is finely tuned prose, meditations that are quiet but never timid.

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Love, an Index by Rebecca Lindenberg
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Publication Date: March 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-1936365791
Hardcover, $18

On April 27, 2009, American poet, professor, and avid hiker Craig Arnold set out alone to explore an active volcano on the small island of Kuchinoerabujima, off the southern coast of Japan. He was never seen again. The first in McSweeney’s new (and long awaited) poetry series, Rebecca Lindenberg’s first poetry collection tells the story of the love between her and Arnold, and attempts to measure the depth of the pain felt after his disappearance. Her writing is lucid and yearning, and her poems exhibit a rare sort of sincerity: in the face of disaster and loss, she is willing to examine and elaborate the difficult times when love is not so pleasant, in her mission to construct an accurate, honest portrait of the phenomenon of love.

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Litany For the City by Ryan Teitman
Publisher: BOA Editions
Publication Date: April 2012
ISBN: 978-1934414804
Paperback, $9.99

Ryan Teitman’s Philadelphia is a place of wonder, horror, and divinity; a place where music glides on the ghostly body of the breeze, packs of dogs circle bloated carrion, and men sit in plazas and “sip liquor strong enough to peel the skin from a plum.” His poems are surreal, beautiful, and elegiac, and through his voice “the city” as such ceases to be a static object to which things occur, but instead becomes a sort of primordial substance out of which objects emerge and are put into motion. Litany For the City is a startling, significant debut and another fantastic release from one of our favorite publishers of poetry.

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Magic Hours by Tom Bissell
Publisher: Believer Books/McSweeney’s
Publication Date: April 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-936365760
Paperback, $14

Tom Bissell is a journalist and general man-of-letters hailing from the small town Escanaba, Michigan. An expert on American literature with an uncanny capacity for situational detail normally reserved for painters and photographers, Bissell’s essays deal primarily with “creators and creation” — and as with all of the best journalistic non-fiction, the pieces are compelling and eloquently-told stories, alongside which Bissell provides his deft criticism and earnest commentary. He writes about everything from German film-maker Werner Herzog and late novelist David Foster Wallace to the popular sitcom The Big Bang Theory and video games. There is something here for almost anyone, and all of it is good.

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Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Publication Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1590174944
Paperback, $17.95

Robert Sheckley was an absurdly prolific writer. His writing captured the best of Golden Age and New Wave science fiction, but he strayed outside the genre as well (the late JG Ballard called Sheckley “a draught of pure Voltaire and tonic”). Jonathan Lethem and Alex Abramovich have waded through the huge mass of his work to present us with the best of it, and the best of Sheckley is as good as sci-fi gets. Science fiction enthusiasts will find themselves right at home, and for the literary snobs wary of genre, the NYRB Classics logo on the spine should be enough to make them let down their guard.

Disclaimer: The books reviewed here, except where noted, are Advance Review Copies (ARCs) sent by publishers — common practice in the industry. We never accept payment in exchange for a review or mention.

It is hard to write about a novel that one truly loves. When I first read Nanni Balestrini’s The Unseen, it was long out of print, and I had only a photocopied samizdat edition. I read it feverishly. I typed long sections of it to send to friends. The book slept next to me even after I’d finished it, so I could return to it again and again. How could this book be out of print? The Unseen was, for me, the great secret of European literature. As with the other great literary secrets – Gesualdo Bufalino! Gábor Németh! – discovering it was joyous and confusing. Why hadn’t everyone discovered this? How did this book lapse into obscurity?

This January, Verso finally reissued The Unseen in a fine paperback edition. Celebrate, fellow readers, once again you have a chance to experience what may be the greatest Italian novel of the 20th Century.

On the surface, the novel is challenging and uninviting. It is written without any punctuation in short, equally sized paragraphs, and the subject of the novel is the political upheaval of late 1970s Italy, a period unknown to almost any American readers other than students of the Left. What is incredible about Balestrini’s masterpiece is that the formal experimentation of the prose does not make the book hard to read. Almost immediately, the lack of punctuation ceases to be strange. Without any qualifications, I consider it to be a page turner.

I must admit to a more than passing fascination in the Italian Left of the 60s and 70s, but the novel requires no historical knowledge to be understood and enjoyed. The new forward by Antonio Negri, who played a part in the real events fictionalized in The Unseen, gives some historical context and argues for the book’s continued political relevance, but I recommend reading the forward last. The story stands on its own.

Read this book! Immediately! It will fill your spine with gunpowder and light a match in your brain! Request it at your library! Give it to your neighbors!

Hot Pink by Adam Levin
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Publication Date: March 13, 2012
ISBN: 1936365210
Hardcover, $22

During the latter half of 2010, Adam Levin planted his foot firmly in the forefront of the American literary race with his humongous, sprawling, one-thousand-plus page novel The Instructions — in 2012, his first story collection, Hot Pink, firmly establishes his prowess as a craftsman of brilliant-yet-approachable short stories that are highly (and refreshingly) experimental while remaining readable. One can’t help but juxtapose Levin and the previous generation’s literary prodigy, David Foster Wallace. Having already established a level of infamy for an expansive self-contained universe of a novel, the comparison is inevitable; and also much like DFW, Levin is a genius wordsmith, constructing unorthodox, language-bending paragraphs steeped in a biting facetiousness. My favorite story is Jane Tell (the longest in the collection, totaling 38 pages) and it will haunt you forever.

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American Rhapsody by Carole Stone
Publisher: CavanKerry Press
Publication Date: March, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-933880-28-0
Paperback, $16

Stone’s new collection of poems expresses something rarely found in Americana literature about prohibition and the jazz age: the pride of a racketeer’s daughter. The whole collection sings. The poems are beautiful on their own, but they work really well as an ensemble. Too often, poetry collections seem thrown together haphazardly. In American Rhapsody, there is a rhythm to selection. The poems build on each other and paint a compelling landscape of American (and Cuban) life in the 20s and 30s.

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Syzygy, Beauty by T. Fleischmann
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Publication Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-936747-26-9
Paperback, $15.95

Syzygy is one of the most beautiful words in the English language. It’s defined here as referring to “at once to the alignment of celestial bodies in astronomy, repeating relationships in mathematics, and male/female pairings in Gnosticism.” Such a beautiful word sets the tone quite nicely for this gorgeous, heartbreaking little book. It is subtitled “An essay,” but is only an essay in a loose, artistic sense; the book is composed of 140+ small prose pieces which read suprisingly well on their own, as well as “aligning” to tell a story of the ways in which romance and intimacy can be complicated by gender, distance, and the infinite number of ways oneself, one’s life, and one’s relationships can change.

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Fire the Bastards! by Jack Green
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Publication Date: February, 2012
ISBN: 978-1564786098
Paperback, $12.95

Last month we heralded the new paperback editions of William Gaddis’ epic novels The Recognitions and JR. While the former is now widely recognized as one of the great post-war American novels, it was initially panned by reviewers. Fire the Bastards! is a thorough, obsessive attack on the critics and literary establishment that rejected Gaddis’ novel. Even if one knows nothing of Gaddis, it is immensely entertaining. Green’s total decimation of Gaddis’ critics, whom he demonstrates did not read the book, is almost without equal. The closest equivalent is Guy Debord’s Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici, another book-length polemic against the media establishment. This is the perfect companion to the new Gaddis editions.

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The Last Warner Woman by Kei Miller
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Publication Date: March 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-56689-295-7
Paperback, $16

Kei Miller’s latest novel is the intertwining narratives of two storytellers: Adamine Bustamante and “Mr. Writer Man”. Adamine is born in a Jamaican leper colony and later finds herself in a British mental hospital, victim to fear of her apparent prophetic abilities. Spoilers will not be revealed, but trust that all is not as it first appears. Miller is a wonderful writer, especially with dialogue. Recommended for all adult fiction collections.

Every year VIDA researches the gender disparity in publishing, and every year the results are depressingly similar: the writers being published and reviewed by major publications are overwhelmingly male.

We crunched our own numbers for 2011 and found the following:

We reviewed 87 books. 31 books written or edited by women (36%), 51 books written or edited by men (59%), and 5 anthologies without named editors (5%).

We conducted 5 interviews. 2 interviews were with women (40%), and 3 interviews were with men (60%).

Our Best of 2011 list featured 2 books edited or written by women (13%) and 13 books edited or written by men (87%).

Compared to publications like Harper’s or the London Review of Books, we are doing well, but we could be doing more to seek out the amazing books by women being published by indie presses.

It is the reprinting of William Gaddis’ great novels, The Recognitions and JR, that is the best testament to importance of the independent literary press. Both books, languishing in ugly covers and yellowing, battered pages of Penguin paperback editions (remember, it is the well-loved books in the library that have battered pages), maintained a devoted following in the decades since their initial publication but were never given the proper attention or production by their publisher. When published, The Recognitions was famously lambasted by critics in perhaps the most stark case of collective critical malfeasance (documented in Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards!, reprinted by Dalkey Archive alongside the novels), though it has come to be known as one of the great American novels. JR won the National Book Award in 1976.

This month Dalkey Archive Press offers new paperback editions with gorgeous covers and ecstatic introductions by Rick Moody and William H. Gass. These new editions ought to be ordered by every library, save perhaps those of elementary schools (but even then, for the staff!), if only to give a worthy replacement to the well-read older copies already on the shelf. Most introductions can be skipped, but the Moody and Gass introductions are riveting. Their excitement and devotion to the novels is contagious. No lover of fiction can read either without immediately beginning the novel being introduced, no matter the hour of night or the number of books already being read. This is an urgency so often lacking in discussions of books. It is this urgency that led a generation of readers to drop everything and devour every page of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or kept my friends and I awake every night, school or work be damned, to read Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (and keeps us awake still, planning our second reading).

Now it is time to return to Gaddis, to return to these masterworks of American fiction, that remain as urgently beautiful and dense and intelligent today as when they were written. Librarians: put these in your collection, put them on displays, thrust them into the hands of the readers who come through your doors. Readers: do not be intimidated, dive in.

For a printable pdf to bring to your local library, click here.

Varamo by César Aira
Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: February 22, 2012
ISBN: 0811217418
Paperback, $12.95

After Imre Kertész, César Aira is my favorite living writer. He publishes short books (more than eighty of them!) that are so strange and wonderful I often find myself shouting or jumping out of my seat as I read them. New Directions has dutifully published his work in English, and the latest Aira offering is my favorite so far. It is impossible to give a sensible description of the plot, but two few striking images might give an idea of what an astonishing book this is: a fish who survives taxidermy and anarchist race car drivers. The “regularity race” described near the end is the perfect Aira concept, and every library should order this book to give patrons the opportunity to soak in the wonderful madness of it all.

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The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
Publication Date: January, 2012
ISBN: 978-1612190426
Paperback, $14.95

Leigh Stein’s debut novel The Fallback Plan is the story of Esther, a recent college graduate who, for lack of knowing what else to do and having little by way of options, moves back in with her parents. She spends her days taking expired painkillers and devising a screenplay for a film about pandas that is loosely based on The Chronicles of Narnia, until her parents hire her out as a babysitter to a neighborhood couple, a task to which she reluctantly resigns herself. Adulthood is exposed as a facade masking brokenness and doubt, awkward affairs occur, Esther and her two friends in town get drunk a few times; however, a majority of the book describes the adorable, heartwarming interactions between Esther and May, the four-year-old she spends a majority of her days with, and this is where Stein’s crisp, light prose really shines through. A lovely read and exciting precursor to her soon-to-be-published book of poetry, Dispatch From the Future, due this summer from Melville House.

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Satantango by László Krasnahorkai
Publisher: New Directions
Publication Date: February 21, 2012
ISBN: 0811217345
Hardcover, $25.95

Krasnahorkai is one of a handful of Hungarian novelists (others include Péter Nádas and Imre Kertész) who have found Anglophone audiences in the last two decades. Satantango is famously the inspiration for Béla Tarr’s 7 hour long cult film of the same name, and it appears in English for the first time. It is written in the structure of a tango and features the eponymous dance. It is an incredibly dark novel filled with drunkenness, failure, crime, and infidelity. The late critic Susan Sontag called Krasznahorkai a “master of the apocalypse”, and I agree. For those not quite ready for Nádas’ Parallel Stories but not afraid of it, either.

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The Letter All Your Friends Have Written You by Caits Meissner and Tishon
Publisher: Well&Often Press
Publication Date: January 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9836314-0-8
Paperback, $15.95

Well&Often Press is an emerging publishing house in Brooklyn. The Letter All Your Friends Have Written You is their first published book,and it is a fantastic beginning. The Letter is a collaboration between two friends, partitioned into five sections with each poet taking turns in no particular order. For their thematic similarities, the writers retain very distinct voices: Meissner constructs ornate linguistic mosaics which perfectly complement Tishon’s poignant terseness. The poems swing between wistful, nostalgic musings on childhood rebellion (“For Lucille Clifton, In Thanks For The Lost Baby Poem”) to portraits of urban industrialism (“Roosevelt Island,” “Running”) to love letters written for unnamed lovers (“The Sinner Lady to the Black Saint,” “How I Learned to Trust the Water”), all contained within a beautifully designed trade-paperback. An exciting and enjoyable debut, and we are eagerly awaiting more.

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Rough Likeness: Essays by Lia Purpura
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Publication Date: January 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-936747-03-0
Paperback, $15.95

Rough Likeness, Purpura’s first essay collection since her 2006 effort On Looking, is a fantastic beginning to the new year of books. Purpura is renowned as a poet, and this becomes immediately apparent in her essays, which read like prose poems. She has no fear of vulnerability: each piece works through something difficult and personal. I am especially fond of the essay “Advice”, written as a question and answer session between friends about topics ranging from tight pants to sex to writing.

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Dogma by Lars Iyer
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
Publication Date: February 2012
ISBN: 978-1612190464
Paperback, $14.95

The United Kingdom has a Thomas Bernhard, and his name is Lars Iyer. Dogma is the second novel in a trilogy that began with Iyer’s first novel Spurious. It is the story of two Kafka-obsessed windbag British intellectuals, W. and Lars, on a mission to devise and hawk an odd, spartan meta-philosophy they call Dogma. W. is a hardheaded and hyperbolic Jewish professor who spends much of his time devising eloquent ways to insult his colleague Lars, a slovenly and depressed Danish Hindu with an inexplicable obsession with the mysterious Texas blues musician Jandek. The two are unabashedly referential, pulling inspiration from (and speaking constantly of) numerous avant-garde artists and directors: Dogma is a reference to filmmaker Lars Von Trier’s manifesto Dogme95. W. seems to be constantly projecting Werner Herzog’s film Strozsek on a wall in his house. They quote Bataille, Pascal, Leibniz, Rosenzweig, and Cohen. Dogma is hilarious and bleak and loaded with illuminating, brilliant passages, and Iyer’s rapid-fire staccato prose is well-suited to the task. For those who like their dark, difficult books to be funny.

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The Last Books of Héctor Viel Temperley
Publisher: Sand Paper Press
Publication Date: December, 2011
ISBN: 0984331247
Paperback, $15

Virtually unknown in the Anglophone world during his lifetime, iconoclastic Argentinian poet Héctor Viel Temperley found translation only after his death. This collection brings together two of the poet’s final books, Crawl and Hospital Británico — the former a collection of images as seen by a swimmer passing by an urban coastline in a thunderstorm; the latter the chaotic and kaleidoscopic ruminations of Temperley himself while hospital-bound and recovering from brain surgery — in a single gorgeous trade-paperback volume. Temperley’s poems are visceral, surreal, and luminous (and occasionally terrifying). They are written from a deep-seated commitment to the rigorous development of religious thought; I can imagine Temperley as a demented analogue of T. S. Eliot. I will be reading and re-reading this collection for years to come.

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Vicky Swanky is a Beauty by Diane Williams
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Publication Date: January, 2012
ISBN: 1936365715
Hardcover, $20

This is a short story collection, but it’s not the usual sort of short story collection. Here, 50 stories are collected in just over 120 pages. Each story is roughly two pages long. In keeping with Williams’ previous work, the micro-fictions are delivered in an appropriately weird voice, and they describe this world, rather than create a new one. Williams somehow manages to be frank and subtle about sex at the same time, which is no small achievement. For this alone the book is worth reading, but there is something here for (almost) any adult reader if they give the language a chance. The book is also a compelling physical object; McSweeney’s lives up to their reputation for excellent design and production quality. For fans of Lydia Davis.

JR by William Gaddis
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Publication Date: February 7, 2012
ISBN: 1564784339
Paperback, $18.95

The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Publication Date: February 7, 2012
ISBN: 1564786919
Paperback, $18.95

(Featured review of the Gaddis titles forthcoming)

Disclaimer: The books reviewed here, except where noted, are Advance Review Copies (ARCs) sent by publishers — common practice in the industry. We never accept payment in exchange for a review or mention.

For a pdf of this list to print and bring to your library, click here.

Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch
Publisher: New Directions
Pub Date: January 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-0811219501
Paperback, 14.95

As a teenager, Czech poet Gustav Janouch lived out the fantasy of every reader (well, at least my fantasy): to have countless long walks and conversations with Franz Kafka. Janouch’s father happened to work with Kafka and arranged their meeting, and Janouch captured their conversations in this charming book. In the introduction, Francine Prose puts forward the possibility that much of the dialogue in the book is fictionalized, but this hardly matters. The meandering conversations about literature, philosophy, and life are not just biographical filler of the writer and poet but compelling fragments on their own. For lovers of Kafka and young or not-so-young aspiring writers.

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Berlin Stories by Robert Walser
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Pub Date: January 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1590174548
Paperback, $14

Each story in this collection is only a few pages long, but, as he did in his remarkable Microscripts, Walser manages to pack a lot into very few words. One gets the impression that Walser knew a good deal about everything, though the Swiss German writer spent a lot of his life institutionalized in mental hospitals. Walter Benjamin wrote that Walser’s characters are like figures from fairy tales after the tale has ended and they must return to normal life. The central character in these stories is always Berlin, a Berlin that only he could write. Highly recommended.

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An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Pub Date: January 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1590173411
Paperback, $16.95

In 2007 and 2008, NYRB Classics published Rezzori’s difficult but brilliant novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and his memoir The Snows of Yesteryear. It is not a slight to either of those fine books to say this volume is better than both of them. This is the sort of novel that one is tempted to quote at length, and there are innumerable lines in only the first handful of pages that I’m tempted to quote here. Czernopol, a city “somewhere in the godforsaken southeastern part of Europe”, is filled with an incredible and incredibly strange cast of characters, including a certain Austrian officer who just can’t get things right. Read this novel!

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2011 Non-Fiction Titles You Might Have Missed

Woolgathering by Patti Smith
Publisher: New Directions
Pub Date: November, 2011
ISBN: 978-0811219440
Hardcover, $18.95

Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids won a National Book Award in 2010. Woolgathering is also a memoir, but it is smaller and more intimate. These anecdotes and poems about growing up and becoming an artist are, of course, beautifully written, and they will be eagerly read by any fan of Smith’s work. Following the enormous popularity of Just Kids, Woolgathering is an important addition to non-fiction collections.

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The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg
Publisher: Verso
Pub Date: February, 2011
ISBN: 978-1844674534
Hardcover, $39.95

Rosa Luxemburg stakes out a peculiar place in the 20th Century: a communist who was critical of the Bolsheviks, a Polish Jewish woman who became prominent in German politics, a steadfast critic of nationalism and war, and a martyr whose death symbolized the coming of Nazism. Christopher Hitchens called her the most brilliant of all the Marxist intellectuals. For the first time, Verso is publishing Luxemburg’s complete works in English, and the first volume of this collection is a beautiful collection of her correspondence. Earlier collections of her letters were incomplete and tended to focus on specific aspects of her life (generally, either her romances or her politics). This collection is commendable because it gives us a three-dimensional view of Luxemburg, and it is engrossing.

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The Convert by Deborah Baker
Publisher: Graywolf
Pub Date: May, 2011
ISBN: 978-1555975821
Hardcover, $23

In 1962, Margaret Marcus left her life as a secular Jew in suburban New York to move to Pakistan, where she converted to Islam and became Maryam Jameelah. As a Muslim convert in Pakistan, she authored articles denouncing America, Israel, and secularism. Using an archive of Maryam’s letters and articles at the New York Public Library, Deborah Baker writes an unorthodox and unsettling biography (controversially, Baker edits and rewrites some of Maryam’s letters). The story is ultimately a tragic one, as Maryam falls out with her adopted family in Pakistan and finds herself in mental hospitals, just as she had in New York. An intense and topical book that will find readers in any library.

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Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy by Alain Badiou
Publisher: Verso
Pub Date: June, 2011
ISBN: 978-1844676941
Hardcover, $24.95

At first glance, a book about the enigmatic Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein written by the French philosopher Alain Badiou sounds like a specialist tome, but it is actually short and written in an accessible style. Badiou does something here that is done very rarely in works about Wittgenstein: he takes Wittgenstein’s Christianity seriously. In fact, he places Wittgenstein in company with the other great Christian ‘antiphilosophers’, Kierkegaard and Pascal (Badiou adds Nietzsche to this list as well, saying Nietzsche wrote enough about Christianity to be considered a Christian of sorts). This makes for an original and compelling book. Recommended for those interested in contemporary philosophy and Christian intellectualism.

Disclaimer: The books reviewed here, except where noted, are Advance Review Copies (ARCs) sent by publishers — common practice in the industry. We never accept payment in exchange for a review or mention.

Update 1/11/2012: The contest is still open!

There are three ways to win free books from New Directions, NYRB Classics, and other great indie publishers!!

1) In celebration of the publication of The Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, we’re giving away NYRB Classics books to the best video about how to pronounce “Krzhizhanovsky”. The contest will be judged by Krzhizhanovsky’s translators! Send a link to your video to contest(at)heysmallpress.org or send a tweet to @heysmallpress.

2) If you work for a library and register for our email newsletter, you’re eligible to win a free book. Forward your newsletter confirmation email to contest(at)heysmallpress.org from a library email address.

3) Write a post about Hey Small Press! on your blog, and send a link to contest(at)heysmallpress.org or tweet @heysmallpress.

Books available to win include:

As 2011 draws to a close, we put together a best of the year list pulled entirely from books we reviewed:

1. Fiasco by Imre Kertész (Melville House)
Kertész is the greatest living writer in Europe, maybe the world, and Fiasco is perfect. That is not hyperbole.

2. The Absent Sea by Carlos Franz (McPherson and Company)
A powerful novel about the legacy of Pinochet that has been criminally overlooked by the critical establishment.

3. Tyrant Memory by Horacio Castellanos Moya (New Directions)
Central America’s Thomas Bernhard has yet to disappoint.

4. Suicide by Edouard Levé (Dalkey Archive)
Haunting book made more haunting by the real suicide of the author.

5. Erasure by Percival Everett (Graywolf)
Paperback reprint of Everett’s classic novel about race and publishing.

6. A Heaven of Others by Joshua Cohen (Starcherone)
New, corrected edition of Cohen’s terrifying vision of the afterlife.

7. The Sexy Part of the Bible by Kola Boof (Akashic)
An African sort-of-sci-fi political feminist thriller that has to be read.

8. Tres by Roberto Bolaño (New Directions)
It was hard to pick which Bolaño to include in this list, but the prose poems stand out even more than the essay collection.

9. Demolishing Nisard by Eric Chevillard (Dalkey Archive)
Obsessive, strange, and hilarious.

10. Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner (Coffee House)
Lerner’s fiction debut lives up to the hype and speaks to the condition of his generation better than anything else.

11. Charles Olson at Goddard College ed. by Kyle Schlesinger (Cuneiform)
A rare look into the mind of one of the great poets of the 20th Century.

12. From the Observatory by Julio Cortazar (Archipelago)
Cortazar’s mixing of two unrelated subjects is masterful.

13. 30 Under 30: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction ed. by Blake Butler and Lily Hoang (Starcherone)
A more experimental alternative to the New Yorker’s list. The Shane Jones story is worth the price of admission.

14. The Judges of the Secret Court by David Stacton (NYRB Classics)
The assassination of Lincoln is retold in this exciting and powerful novel.

15. The Snow Whale by John Minichillo (Atticus)
The funniest book we reviewed all year. A retelling of Moby Dick that takes on the absurdity of identity and authenticity.