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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.
