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Gert Loschütz - a superb example of a distinctly German tradition in weird...
Gert Loschütz, Dark Company: A Novel in Ten Rainy Nights, Trans. by Samuel P. Willcocks, Seagull Books, 2013.“Of course I had to end up here . . .”Over ten rainy nights, Thomas, an ex-bargeman who used...
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Diane Meur calls upon an unusual narrator: the ancestral house itself—the...
Diane Meur, House of Shadows, Trans. byTeresa Lavender Fagan, Seagull Books, 2015.After the failed revolutions of 1848, Galicia has been brought under the rule of the Habsburg Empire, and the Zemka...
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José Carlos Llop - A literary gem, regarded by the critics as one of the best...
José Carlos Llop, The Stein Report, Trans. by Howard Curtis, Hispabooks, 2014.'The Stein Report', set in the island of Majorca in the 1960s, kicks off with the arrival of a newcomer that throws things...
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Klaus Hoffer - a German cult favorite and a masterwork of culture shock...
Klaus Hoffer, Among the Bieresch, Trans. by Isabel Fargo Cole, Seagull Books, 2016.Young Hans arrives with one suitcase in a squalid village on the eastern edge of empire—a surreal postwar Austria. His...
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Elena Garro - a classic of Latin American literature, using elements of magic...
Elena Garro, Recollections of Things to Come, Trans. by Ruth L. C. Simms, University of Texas Press, 1969. [1950/1963..]read it at Google BooksThis remarkable first novel depicts life in the small...
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Sergio Galindo - With homely features, but with a body so shapely and...
Sergio Galindo, Otilia's Body: A Novel, Trans. by Carolyn Brushwood and John Brushwood, University of Texas Press 1994.read it at Google BooksWinner of Mexico's prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia prize in...
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Hans Scherfig - With trenchant wit and ironic detachment, Scherfig unravels...
Hans Scherfig, Stolen Spring, Trans. by Frank Hugus,Fjord Press, 1983.I recently reviewed two novels–Stolen Spring and The Missing Bureaucrat–by Danish author Hans Scherfig. Both of the novels were...
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The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory...
The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. by Maria Del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, Bloomsbury, 2015.read it at Google BooksGhosts, spirits, and specters...
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Roy Scranton - Our greatest enemy, it turns out, is ourselves. The warmer,...
Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, City Lights Books, 2015."Roy Scranton lucidly articulates the depth of the climate crisis with an honesty that is all too rare, then calls for a...
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Volter Kilpi - If you are the kind of person who would find fascinating a...
Volter Kilpi, In Alastalo’s parlour, 1933.extractVolter Kilpi’s classic novel Alastalon salissa (‘In Alastalo’s parlour’, 1933) has a reputation as a ‘difficult’ book. A Swedish translation is finally...
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Lina Meruane - Fiction and autobiography intertwine in an intense, visceral,...
Lina Meruane, Seeing Red, Deep Vellum, Trans. by Megan McDowell, 2016."Meruane's prose has great literary force: it emerges from the hammer blows of conscience, but also from the ungraspable, and from...
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Géza Csáth's stories often feature a mix of cruelly demented characters and...
Géza Csáth, Opium and Other Stories, Various translators, 1983story Little EmmaThe Magician’s Garden, and Other Stories (also published as Opium, and Other Stories) by Géza Csáth (Among his other...
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Ithell Colquhoun - the combination of obscure medieval occult references with...
Ithell Colquhoun, Goose of Hermogenes, Peter Owen Publishers, 2003. [1961.] www.ithellcolquhoun.co.uk/The heroine of this fascinating story (described only as ‘I’) is compelled to...
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Graeme Gibson - the subversive tale of two guilt-ridden young men. Gibson...
Graeme Gibson, Five Legs, House of Anansi Press; Second ed., 2013. [1969.]read it at Google BooksFirst published by Anansi in 1969, Five Legs was a breakthrough for Canadian experimental fiction,...
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Mustafa Mutabaruka - an intense tale of personal disintegration and the...
Mustafa Mutabaruka, Seed, Akashic Books, 2002.Written in a tense, halting style that mirrors the strained, unsettling urgency of the protagonist, SEED weaves its competing narratives together into a...
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Rosalyn Drexler plunges into the emerging zeitgeist (of the 1970s) with...
Rosalyn Drexler, One or Another, Dell Books, 1971.The LA Times quote on the cover of "One or Another" says, "An infinite variety of sexual roles, a taboo area that most men would rather sweep under the...
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Lisa Ciccarello - Vulnerable in the darkness as the dead watch behind...
Lisa Ciccarello, At Night, Black Ocean, 2015.www.lisaciccarello.com/at issuuTold in an age we can't quite put our finger on, the poems in Lisa Ciccarello's debut collection twist up from tales of...
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Lygia Fagundes Telles - a delirious and complicated story of feminine...
Lygia Fagundes Telles, The Girl in the Photograph, Trans. by Margaret A. Neves, Dalkey Archive Press, 2012.Complex and hauntingly beautiful, Lygia Fagundes Telles’s most acclaimed novel is a journey...
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Emiliya Dvoryanova - an experiment in blurring the boundaries between the...
Emiliya Dvoryanova, Concerto for Sentence: An Exploration of the Musico-Erotic, Trans. by Elitza Kotzeva, dalkey Archive Press, 2016.Subtitled “An Exploration of the Musico-Erotic,” this novel is an...
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John Kinsella - everything you’ve ever wanted in a work of literature / and...
John Kinsella, Morpheus: A Bildungsroman, BlazeVOX, 2013.Morpheus has its origins in a novel John Kinsella worked on in his late teens — a time of transition between adolescence and adulthood, but not...
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