Current and Forthcoming Titles

Like his creator, the narrator of this novel is a psychiatrist who loathes psychiatry, a veteran of the despised 1970s colonial war waged by Portugal against Angola, a survivor of a failed marriage, and a man seeking meaning in an uncaring and venal society. The reader joins Antunes on a journ...March 2008 [More]

The Temple of the Wild Geese, a semi-autobiographical account of Mizukami’s childhood, tells the tale of Jinen, a Buddhist monk raised by villagers after his mother, a beggar, abandoned him. Sent to live at a temple at the age of ten, his resentment smolders for years until it explodes ...March 2008 [More]

Life Itself is the first book-length study in English of the great Flemish writer Louis Paul Boon. A.M.A. van den Oever begins by questioning the paradox between Boon’s international reputation as a significant innovator of the novel, and the peculiarly reductive biographical interpreta...March 2008 [More]

A gift for his wife, Jay Wright’s Polynomials and Pollen explores the complementary exigencies of abstraction and physicality. In five sections, each arranged under the aegis of a tutelary concept—from the Yoruba, Akan, Bamana, and Náhuatl—the book is a constellation of prot...April 2008 [More]

The Presentable Art of Reading Absence takes as impulse the act of meditation, in which the energetic relationship between a meditative body and its universe is not only the envisioning of absence by presence but also vision itself: "Here begins the revelation of a kiosk." With occult e...April 2008 [More]

The thirteen short stories that make up Amanda Michalopoulou’s I’d Like read like versions of an unwritten novel: each riveting tale resonates with the others, and yet a sense of their connectedness remains tantalizingly out of grasp. Instead, we are presented with a kaleidoscope of cha...April 2008 [More]

At some Parisian lost-and-found, a mysterious manuscript scribbled onto stray bits of hotel stationary and postcards and stuffed into an abandoned briefcase comes into the hands of an "editor," who claims to faithfully transcribe and assemble the random texts. On the face of it, these consist ...May 2008 [More]

Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, was—as Nicholas Delbanco writes—“world famous in his lifetime,” yet now he has been “almost wholly forgotten.” Like Delbanco himself, Sally Ormsby Thompson Robinson—the narrator of this novel and the Count’s fictional, last-surviving relative...May 2008 [More]

In this contemporary retelling of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Estonian writer Mati Unt offers a playful yet unsettling mixture of fact and fiction, combining pieces of Estonian political history—in particular the figure of Lydia Koidula (1843-1886), widely regarded as the first Estonia...May 2008 [More]

Meet Monsieur, your hero, a successful young executive in Paris whose daily life you will follow in precise detail. He is nothing if not unremarkable. Meet his secretary, his nieces, his fiancée and her parents, his neighbor whose scientific reports Monsieur unwittingly types out. What will ha...June 2008 [More]

In addition to “The Glass Slipper,” this collection contains nine other stories held together by a common thread of self-perception: Yasuoka writes from the belief that the self has such depths that at times it can appear to be illusory. Set against the chaotic backdrop of the era running from...June 2008 [More]

In Makbara, Juan Goytisolo—widely considered Spain’s greatest living writer—again dazzles the reader with his energetic, stylistic prose, which he himself compares to a snake: cunning, sly, sinuous. But the themes in Makbara are perhaps more universal than in his earl...July 2008 [More]

In this short, brilliant book, Viktor Shklovsky enunciates the function of the arts: what they are and, just as importantly, what they are not. In the course of defining what art is, by implication he also quietly lays to waste the theories and people who view art as a means of representing “t...July 2008 [More]

Since his first novel was published in 1985, Richard Powers has assembled a body of work whose intellectual breadth and imaginative energy bears comparison with that of any writer working today. Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers pays tribute to that achievement by collecting seven...July 2008 [More]

Fiction Now reports on the current states of the novel in France, taking a series of soundings within the compass of innovative French writing since 2001. Chapters focus closely upon Jean Echenoz, Marie Redonnet, Christian Gailly, Lydie Salvayre, Gérard Gavarry, Hélène Lenoir, Patrick L...August 2008 [More]