A fanciful, wickedly inventive and poignant conjuration. Weinberger has made an infidel’s Book of Hours in an attempt to reinterpret a world that is more alien and insecure by the day, to imagine some things beyond the reach of search engines.
Eliot Weinberger’s Angels and Saints is glorious— a deeply scholarly and playful work, in which the mind of an essayist meets the sensibility of a poet. It is as lovely an object as its subject might require, illustrated by the grid poems of Hrabanus Maurus (circa 780–856), with an additional note on their complexities by Mary Wellesley.
Weinberger delivers a meditation on the nature of angels and saints, illustrated with gorgeous reproductions of the works of ninth century German Benedictine monk Hrabanus Maurus. An interpretation of angels concludes with a beautifully laid out 'angelology,' naming various angels and their powers, such as Mach, who can make one invisible. The rest of the volume is devoted to the stories of saints—some of which are quite lengthy, such as the biography of Saint Therese. Others are as brief as a sentence. (For John the Almsgiver, 'He never spoke an idle word.') Academic and lay readers interested in Christian thought will enjoy Weinberger’s eclectic homage to angels and saints.
Like Thomas Aquinas before him, Weinberger is a brilliant scholar in a dark age.
My favorite essayist is Eliot Weinberger. His remarkable breadth of calm concern is impressive.
In Angels & Saints, the beauty of Weinberger’s prose is itself given a visual counterpoint in the multi-colored grid poems of ninth-century Benedictine monk Rabanus Maurus. Each of his sentences thrums with its own vitality. Each subject feels like it’s been granted a second life in text.
Eliot Weinberger is a master essayist, a furious thinker and an exceptionally elegant writer.

Accreting through cumulative and sometimes contradictory accounts of a crumbling São Paulo dynasty, this philosophical novel examines what people present and what they conceal, even from themselves....Bracher and translator Morris render a sophisticated, multifaceted portrait of a family that endures nevertheless through its decline and the prolonged fallout from the choices they made—or that were left them—through the lives they lived. An elegant and nuanced meditation on family, class, perception, illness, and death.
This spellbinding and surprising work announced Bracher as one of the most fascinating contemporary Brazilian writers.Â
No one but Beatriz Bracher would be able to write a book like Antonio in Brazil today, because only she manages to write so intimately and forcefully, so ironically and bitterly, about the bourgeois upper class.
Praise for I Didn't Talk:Â Brilliant, enigmatic, haunting, powerful; Bracher is a force to be reckoned with.
Simmering.
Above all, it's the writing that shines in I Didn't Talk. It's a novel that's intelligent but not showy, and Bracher's restraint makes the story all the more potent. And the story is an important one. I Didn't Talk isn't just about one emotionally bruised man; it's about the lasting effects of violence, and the way cruelty causes its victims to torture themselves.
As in her novel “I Didn’t Talk” (also elaborately translated by Morris), Bracher brilliantly picks away at the web of secrets and lies plaguing a family and country.
Grief and distance have the power to turn memory into myth in Antonio, a masterpiece of storytelling that is slippery and prismatic, biting and cynical, and then, at last, gentle.
Antonio feel[s] neither entirely like the work of a single author nor like a folk tale, propelling it into a liminal space that allows Bracher to address her real subject: the enduring violence, misogyny, and racism of Brazil’s hierarchical society.

Mars-Jones’ trim, poignant novel humanizes the intricacies of a dominant-submissive gay relationship.... As the narrator says, “What I saw of his life was about excitement, about magic,” a spell that will fall on readers, too.
Mars-Jones’s prose is exceptionally nimble, dry, humorously restrained, very English, with a little Nabokovian velvet too. He can describe more or less anything and make it interesting.
Mars-Jones is a writer of wonderful originality and wit.
Dry, accurate, tragic.
I very much enjoyed Box Hill. It is a characteristic Mars-Jones mixture of the shocking, the endearing, the funny, and the sad, with an unforgettable narrator. The sociological detail is as ever acutely enduring.

Arbus’s writing is uniformly tight and focused, rendered with a light, amusing touch. The Jamesian quality of her prose extends to the book’s pleasantly gothic atmosphere, reminiscent of The Turn of the Screw...The Caretaker is an enigmatic and necessary book, especially for those conflicted about the physical detritus accumulated over the course of a life.
Taking cues from tales by Kafka and Robert Walser, Arbus pulls off an unnerving feat of contemporary postmodernism. A sly debut novel.
Arbus takes the narrative into a realm where hallucination, perhaps, a trace of the supernatural, just maybe, and obsession, undoubtedly, are the only keys to the riddle that she, no mean trickster, has conjured up. And it is made even more disorienting by Arbus’s distinctive voice, calm, wry, deadpan amid absurdity, and yet capable of lyricism at unexpected moments.
Doon Arbus’s beautiful, moving, original novel does just what we want a novel to do: It creates a fictional world that reflects, illuminates and reveals the ‘real’ world we live in. This wryly funny, subversively philosophical book is brief—yet deep enough to contain humans and objects, love and death, memory and amnesia, oblivion and survival. It generates its own musical score: a phrase of Satie, a few notes of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and then the Beethoven sonata.
Doon Arbus' debut novel is a kind of mystery--about who we become, what the absent leave us with, and why. Dense, visual, and true, this short book speaks volumes about the theatre of the mind, and how the ensuing comedic drama we call life unfolds inside and outside our control. A marvelous new voice.Â

Ellis Island combines poetry with prose and literary quotation with empirical fact, employing the hybridity of text to reflect upon the very concept of integration. While exploring the island—its history, its buildings, its leftovers—Perec identifies Ellis Island as a non-place, an isle of tears, and reveals Emma Lazarus’s metaphor of America’s ‘golden door,’ which is emblazoned upon the Statue of Liberty, to be little but a false promise.
Part history, part memoir, part meditation, this extended essay is a strikingly original and striking book.
The lyric study of Ellis Island is a mournful counterfactual about what might have been had his parents—and many others—made it across the ocean.… If Perec took pride in not repeating himself, it did not stop him from returning, as if in an elliptical orbit, to the same obsessions: police states, citizens going missing, organized brutality, human fragility.
Graceful and intriguing.

As Oyamada’s slim, beguiling novel unfolds, the eerie atmospherics steadily ascend from unease to maximal uncanny...
The Hole magnifies the plight of some younger adults, particularly women. Work is banal. Childrearing is unappealing. And being a housewife is not, as one of Asa’s older neighbors describes it, “a summer vacation that never ends.” What, the novel asks, is left for a woman to do?
The Hole tells a fantastical story, as translated by David Boyd, in which increasingly bizarre illusions blend into reality, with a reclusive adult at the center. Oyamada unsettles readers, not allowing us to remain comfortable in the reality she creates, which makes for a beguiling read.
It takes a writer of great talent to mold the banality of the everyday into the stuff of art, and to build an entire world around a metaphor other writers might quickly deploy and cast aside, but Oyamada is in complete control of her talent.Â
Oyamada’s atmospheric literary thriller puts a fresh, gripping spin on the bored housewife set-up.
The Hole is Oyamada’s second novel, and the second to be translated into pitch-perfect contemporary English by David Boyd....Brilliant.
Oyamada's slender novel belies a multi-layered, complex examination of contemporary disconnect and isolation so chillingly affecting that the surreal quickly turns convincingly plausible, and then all too insistently real.
Oyamada’s greatest strength lies in keeping readers feeling discomfited... [The] whole narrative shudders not at mysterious creatures or secret family members but at the banality of life.
Surreal and mesmerizing.
The desire to escape the doldrums of late summer, for both the isolated Asa and the (likely lockdown-weary) reader, is telling of the current moment’s general malaise.
Horrific and scary, while at the same time affirming and beautiful.

Every page vibrates with feeling. It’s not enough to say that Lispector bends language or uses words in new ways. Plenty of modernists do that. No one else writes prose this rich.
Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster. The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the twenty-first century.
This new translation of The Hour of the Star reveals the mesmerizing force of the revitalized modernist’s Rio-set tale of a young naif, who, along with the piquantly intrusive narrator, challenges the reader’s notions of identity, storytelling, and love.
Most late work has a spectral beauty, a sense of form and content dancing a slow and skillful waltz with each other. Lispector, on the other hand, as she came to the end of her life, wrote as though her life was beginning, with a sense of a need to stir and shake narrative itself to see where it might take her, as the bewildered and original writer that she was, and us, her bewildered and excited readers.
I’m really obsessed by this writer from Brazil, Clarice Lispector. I love her because she writes whole novels where not one thing happens—she describes the air. I think she’s such a great, great novelist.

Kafka himself stays well enough afloat. Even when he fumbles, he never falls wholly flat: at his worst, he is provocative yet provisional. But at his best, he is hilarious and mordant, mired in the impossibilities that he could neither live with nor without.
This delightful collection features dozens of untitled fragments, false starts, and unfinished work by Kafka, found and chosen by biographer Stach...Opening sentences such as “I was allowed to set foot in a strange garden” and “The city resembles the sun,” make the reader’s pulse heighten with the thrill of entering the space of great literature. This offers precisely the kind of fare Kafka enthusiasts would hope for from the legendary writer’s archives.Â
They have been translated by polyphonic, wizardly Michael Hofmann, who has made of Kafka a marvelous, often very humorous writer of eccentric English prose.
These marks make visible the fourth wall that is implicit in each work Kafka left in some way unfinished, and even in those whose publication he permitted. It’s not only the characters, but Kafka himself who could find no way out. The Lost Writings helps us linger with him, in his impassable doorways.
I think of a Kafka story as a perfect work of literary art, as approachable as it is strange, and as strange as it is approachable.
Kafka is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him.
If the mundane is, for Kafka, the domain of improbability and impossibility—wherein even the simplest of gestures cannot be guaranteed—the extraordinary is evoked with an air of sheer certitude.

Erpenbeck has emerged as one of the most original voices in contemporary European letters. Not a Novel is not just autobiographical. There are fascinating reflections on German literature — Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Hans Fallada, Thomas Mann and Walter Kempowski’s war novel All for Nothing — as well as exquisite descriptions of the writing process.
An ideal introduction to the life and work of an exceptional artist.
This collection of essays, memoirs and critical pieces forms an intellectual biography of Europe’s most history-obsessed writer. Beginning with her childhood in East Berlin in the early ‘60s and ‘70s, the book moves in concentric circles, from the intimate and understatedly moving to the moment History collides with her life. A powerful voice singing the past into the present’s melody.
To read Erpenbeck’s musings on the majesty of folk tales or on life in the shadow of the Stasi is to begin to understand the forces that propelled her to become the deft, fearless author she is today.
Fearless, playful, incisive. Erpenbeck is unique
These essays, lectures and musings from the ever-elegant German writer Jenny Erpenbeck cover life, art and society. Jumbled together are thoughts on language, history and freedom, a moving piece – in the shape of an inventory – on her mother’s death, and finally, on Germany’s treatment of refugees. Clear-eyed and perceptive, Erpenbeck’s writing packs an emotive punch.
As this collection makes clear, hers is a life (and writing-life) well worth examining.
Erpenbeck’s anger is palpable and this collection reveals both her creative process and the injustices that drive her to write.
In this attentive prose, in her desire to map stories that are suppressed and rhythms of the heart that keep being forgotten, Erpenbeck is one of the most vital writers working today.
Wonderful, elegant, and exhilarating—ferocious as well as virtuosic.
Erpenbeck is a virtuoso whose eye for detail depends entirely on a refusal to write what’s easy or straightforward. It’s a perspective conditioned by losing one identity and watching an entire country disappear in the name of freedom.
The texts collected here come from many eras and many moments and seem to fall around the reader like bits of glass....There is something terrifying but liberating about seeing a person construct herself and her history in a way that feels so opposite to everything we are told.
The impact is of a master at work—Erpenbeck ought to be considered for the Nobel.
Not A Novel is a collection of the sort of pieces – some profound, others incidental – that naturally arise as part of a professional writing career. Many are concerned with growing up in the GDR and the experience of having the society that formed your worldview disappear.... At a time when former East German states vote in increasing numbers for the right-wing party Alternativ für Deutschland, Erpenbeck’s voice is all the more important for its ability to draw attention to a parallel world, one that sought to call a new future into being, rather than harking back to a darker past.
One of the pleasures of reading Not a Novel is just that—it’s not a novel. Each piece stands on its own and is dense and lucid, demanding pause and reflection....Her words stay with you.
Erpenbeck’s writing is a lure that leads us—off-center as into a vortex—to the most haunted and haunting territory.
The most profound, intelligent, humane, and important writer of our times. Forget the nombrilistes writing about themselves who have taken up so much of the conversational space. Jenny Erpenbeck is where it is all happening. She watches, notes, records, and interprets the world, not just herself in it. This is real literature: alive, vital, necessary, witty, beautiful, transformative.
Her restrained, unvarnished prose is overwhelming.

Field’s frequently shifting scenes evoke Alice Notley, Anne Carson, and James Joyce.
Thalia Field’s curiosity and probe are infectious, tantalizing, irrepressible. She is one of our most startling, original younger writers.
Between the inward tension of the point and the outward push of the line, Thalia Field maps a force field of relations, power games, shifting configurations, in a language both cool and intense, and with a surveyor’s precision.
A hybrid of essayistic fragments and poetic lines exploring the toxic relationship between humans and the animal world by way of myth, metaphor and science: 'the forests have changed, the temperatures, / whole species gone north or south.'
Field draws from a variety of sources — scientific, historical, philosophical — to create a kind of text collage that nonetheless moves from point to point. Her sense of humor is witty and snarky....Field lands many a critical body blow to speciesism.
Thalia Field does not settle on final answers but draws us into inquiries that unsettle our definitions. She is ignited by nature and the wild; she does not recoil from repelling us with factual talk; her book intends to move us to thoughtful action by destabilizing us with art.