Author Archive

Town of Shadows

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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

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

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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

The End of the Story

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The End of the Story Liliana Heker Trans. Andrea G. Labinger Biblioasis, Spring 2012 184 pages $16.95 Type: metafiction, urgent Lens: kaleidoscopic Tones: questioning, contemplative, analytic, detached wryness

Minuet For Guitar

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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,

Come In and Cover Me

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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

From the Observatory

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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

Wunderkind

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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

The Chronology of Water

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The Chronology of Water Lidia Yuknavitch Hawthorne Books, April 2011 268 pages $15.95 “Little tragedies are difficult to keep straight,” writes Lidia Yuknavitch in The Chronology of Water. “They swell and dive in and out in great sinkholes in the brain.” The loss of her daughter, stillborn, is precisely