Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Graywolf Press:<\/p>\n Sitting at the bedside of his mother as she is dying from leukemia in a hospital in northern Mexico, the narrator of\u00a0Tomb Song\u00a0<\/i>is immersed in memories of his unstable boyhood and youth. His mother, Guadalupe, was a prostitute, and Juli\u00e1n spent his childhood with his half brothers and sisters, each from a different father, moving from city to city and from one tough neighborhood to the next.<\/p>\n Swinging from the present to the past and back again,\u00a0Tomb Song<\/i>\u00a0is not only an affecting coming-of-age story but also a searching and sometimes frenetic portrait of the artist. As he wanders the hospital, from its buzzing upper floors to the haunted depths of the morgue, Juli\u00e1n tells fevered stories of his life as a writer, from a trip with his pregnant wife to a poetry festival in Berlin to a drug-fueled and possibly completely imagined trip to another festival in Cuba. Throughout, he portrays the margins of Mexican society as well as the attitudes, prejudices, contradictions, and occasionally absurd history of a country ravaged by corruption, violence, and dysfunction.<\/p>\n Inhabiting the fertile ground between fiction, memoir, and essay,\u00a0Tomb Song\u00a0<\/i>is an electric prose performance, a kaleidoscopic, tender, and often darkly funny exploration of sex, love, and death. Juli\u00e1n Herbert\u2019s English-language debut establishes him as one of the most audacious voices in contemporary letters.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Riverhead Books:<\/p>\n Acclaimed for the grace, wit, and magic of her novels, Ramona Ausubel introduces us to a geography both fantastic and familiar in eleven new stories, some of them previously published in\u00a0The New Yorker<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0The Paris Review<\/i>. Elegantly structured, these stories span the globe and beyond, from small-town America and sunny Caribbean islands to the Arctic Ocean and the very gates of Heaven itself. And though some of the stories are steeped in mythology, they remain grounded in universal experiences: loss of identity, leaving home, parenthood, joy, and longing.<\/p>\n Crisscrossing the pages of\u00a0Awayland<\/i>\u00a0are travelers and expats, shadows and ghosts. A girl watches as her homesick mother slowly dissolves into literal mist. The mayor of a small Midwestern town offers a strange prize, for stranger reasons, to the parents of any baby born on Lenin’s birthday. A chef bound for Mars begins an even more treacherous journey much closer to home. And a lonely heart searches for love online–never mind that he’s a Cyclops.<\/p>\n With her signature tenderness, Ramona Ausubel applies a mapmaker’s eye to landscapes both real and imagined, all the while providing a keen guide to the wild, uncharted terrain of the human heart.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Europa Editions:<\/p>\n Trick<\/i>\u00a0is a stylish drama about ambition, family, and old-age that goes beyond the ordinary and predictable. Imagine a duel between two men. One, Daniele Mallarico, is a successful illustrator who, in the twilight of his years, feels that his reputation and his artistic prowess are fading. The other, Mario, is Daniele’s four-year-old grandson. Daniele has been living in a cold northern city for years, in virtual solitude, focusing obsessively on his work, when his daughter asks if he would come to Naples for a few days and babysit Mario while she and her husband attend a conference. Shut inside his childhood home?an apartment in the center of Naples that is filled with the ghosts of Mallarico’s past?grandfather and grandson match wits as Daniele heads toward a reckoning with his own ambitions and life choices.<\/p>\n Outside the apartment, pulses Naples, a wily, violent, and passionate city whose influence can never be shaken.<\/p>\n Trick<\/i>\u00a0is a gripping, brilliantly devised drama, “an extremely playful literary composition,” as Jhumpa Lahiri describes it in her introduction, by the Strega Prize-winning novelist whom many coinsider to be one of Italy’s greatest living writers.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from NYRB Classics:<\/p>\n The inspiration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s epic film and that\u00a0The Guardian<\/i>\u00a0named one of the “Top 100 Books of All Time,”\u00a0Berlin Alexanderplatz\u00a0<\/i>is considered one of the most important works of the Weimar Republic and twentieth century literature.<\/p>\n Berlin Alexanderplatz<\/i>, the great novel of Berlin and the doomed Weimar Republic, is one of the great books of the twentieth century, gruesome, farcical, and appalling, word drunk, pitchdark. In Michael Hofmann’s extraordinary new translation, Alfred D\u00f6blin’s masterpiece lives in English for the first time.<\/p>\n As D\u00f6blin writes in the opening pages:<\/p>\n The subject of this book is the life of the former cement worker and haulier Franz Biberkopf in Berlin. As our\u00a0<\/i>story begins, he has just been released from prison, where he did time for some stupid stuff; now he is back\u00a0<\/i>in Berlin, determined to go straight.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n To begin with, he succeeds. But then, though doing all right for himself financially, he gets involved in a\u00a0<\/i>set-to with an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n Three times the force attacks him and disrupts his scheme. The first time it comes at him with dishonesty and deception. Our man is able to get to his feet, he is still good to stand.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n Then it strikes him a low blow. He has trouble getting up from that, he is almost counted out. And finally it hits him with monstrous and extreme violence.<\/i><\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Knopf:<\/p>\n From one of our most acclaimed writers, a sumptuous gathering of his singular work in the short form–forty-five stories, including seven entirely new pieces appearing for the first time in book form.<\/p>\n For more than four decades, Thomas McGuane has been heralded as an unrivaled master of the short story. Now the arc of that achievement appears in one definitive volume. Set in the seedy corners of Key West, the remote shore towns of the Bahamas, and McGuane’s hallmark Big Sky country, with its vast and unforgiving landscape, these are stories of people on the fringes of society, whose twisted pasts meddle with their chances for companionship. Moving from the hilarious to the tragic and back again, McGuane writes about familial dysfunction, emotional failure, and American loneliness, celebrating the human ability to persist through life’s absurdities.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Transit Books:<\/p>\n Nothing is simple for the men and women in Andr\u00e9s Barba’s stories. As they go about their lives, they are each tested by a single, destructive obsession. A runner puts his marriage at risk while training for a marathon; a teenager can no longer stand the sight of meat following her parents’ divorce; a man suddenly fixates on the age difference between him and his younger male lover. In four tightly wound novellas, Andr\u00e9s Barba establishes himself as a master of the form.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Farrar, Straus and Giroux:<\/p>\n A sweeping novel of art theft, anti-Semitism, contemporary Cuba, and crime from a renowned Cuban author,\u00a0Heretics<\/i>\u00a0is Leonardo Padura’s greatest detective work yet.<\/p>\n In 1939, the\u00a0Saint Louis<\/i>\u00a0sails from Hamburg into Havana\u2019s port with hundreds of Jewish refugees seeking asylum from the Nazi regime. From the docks, nine-year-old Daniel Kaminsky watches as the passengers, including his mother, father, and sister, become embroiled in a fiasco of Cuban corruption. But the Kaminskys have a treasure that they hope will save them: a small Rembrandt portrait of Christ. Yet six days later the vessel is forced to leave the harbor with the family, bound for the horrors of Europe. The Kaminskys, along with their priceless heirloom, disappear.<\/p>\n Nearly seven decades later, the Rembrandt reappears in an auction house in London, prompting Daniel\u2019s son to travel to Cuba to track down the story of his family\u2019s lost masterpiece. He hires the down-on-his-luck private detective Mario Conde, and together they navigate a web of deception and violence in the morally complex city of Havana.<\/p>\n In\u00a0Heretics<\/i>, Leonardo Padura takes us from the tenements and beaches of Cuba to Rembrandt\u2019s gloomy studio in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, telling the story of people forced to choose between the tenets of their faith and the realities of the world, between their personal desires and the demands of their times. A grand detective story and a moving historical drama, Padura\u2019s novel is as compelling, mysterious, and enduring as the painting at its center.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Knopf:<\/p>\n From the winner of the Man Booker Prize, a masterly novel that spans seven transformative decades as it plumbs the complex relationships of a remarkable family; an immediate best seller upon its publication in England, hailed by the\u00a0Observer\u00a0<\/i>as \u201cperhaps Hollinghurst\u2019s most beautiful novel yet.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1940, David Sparsholt arrives at Oxford, his sights set on joining the Royal Air Force. Handsome, athletic, charismatic, he is unaware of his powerful effect on others\u2014especially on Evert Dax, the lonely and romantic son of a celebrated novelist who is destined to become a writer himself. With the world at war, and the Blitz raging in London, Oxford exists at a strange remove: a place of quiet study, but also of secret liaisons under the cover of blackouts. A friendship develops between David and Evert that will influence their lives for decades to come.<\/p>\n Hollinghurst\u2019s astonishing new novel evokes across three generations the intimate relationships of a group of friends brought together by art, literature and love.\u00a0 We witness shifts in taste and morality through a series of vividly rendered episodes: a Sparsholt holiday in Cornwall; eccentric gatherings at the Dax family home; the adventures of David\u2019s son Johnny, a painter in 1970s London. With tenderness, wit and keen insight,\u00a0The Sparsholt Affair\u00a0<\/i>explores the social and sexual revolutions of the past century, even as it takes us straight to the heart of our current age.<\/p>\n Richly observed, emotionally charged, this is a dazzling novel of fathers and sons; of family and legacy; and of the longing for permanence amid life\u2019s inevitable transience, by the writer acclaimed in\u00a0The Wall Street Journal<\/i>\u00a0as \u201cone of the best novelists at work today.\u201d<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Catapult:<\/p>\n Set in Australia, France, and Sri Lanka,\u00a0The Life to Come<\/i>\u00a0is about the stories we tell and don\u2019t tell ourselves as individuals, as societies, and as nations. Driven by a vivid cast of characters, it explores necessary emigration, the art of fiction, and ethnic and class conflict.<\/p>\n Pippa is an Australian writer who longs for the success of her novelist teacher and eventually comes to fear that she \u201cmissed everything important.\u201d In Paris, Celeste tries to convince herself that her feelings for her married lover are reciprocated. Ash makes strategic use of his childhood in Sri Lanka, but blots out the memory of a tragedy from that time and can\u2019t commit to his trusting girlfriend, Cassie. Sri Lankan Christabel, who is generously offered a passage to Sydney by Bunty, an old acquaintance, endures her dull job and envisions a brighter future that \u201crose, glittered, and sank back,\u201d while she neglects the love close at hand.<\/p>\n The stand-alone yet connected worlds of\u00a0The Life to Come<\/i>\u00a0offer meditations on intimacy, loneliness, and our flawed perception of reality. Enormously moving, gorgeously observant of physical detail, and often very funny, this new novel by Michelle de Kretser reveals how the shadows cast by both the past and the future can transform and distort the present. It is teeming with life and earned wisdom? exhilaratingly contemporary, with the feel of a classic.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Graywolf:<\/p>\n Book two of\u00a0The Encircling Trilogy<\/i>\u00a0continues piecing together the fractured identity of David, the absent central figure who has lost his memory. Three very different friends write letters about his childhood on the backwater island of Otter\u00f8ya. Ole, a farmer struggling to right his floundering marriage, recalls days in the woods when an act of pretending went very wrong. Tom Roger, a rough-edged outsider slipping into domestic violence, shares a cruder side of David as he crows about their exploits selling stolen motorcycles and spreads gossip about who David\u2019s father might be. But it is Paula, a former midwife now consigned to a nursing home, who has the most explosive secret of all, one that threatens to undo everything we know about David.<\/p>\n With a carefully scored polyphony of voices and an unwavering attention to domestic life, Carl Frode Tiller shows how deeply identity is influenced by our friendships.\u00a0The Encircling Trilogy<\/i>\u00a0is an innovative portrayal of one man\u2019s life that is both starkly honest and unnervingly true.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Yale University Press:<\/p>\n A writer of enormous erudition and wide-ranging travels, Claudio Magris selects for this volume writings penned during trips and wanderings over the span of several decades. He has traveled through these years with many beloved companions, to whom he dedicates the book, and sought the kind of journey \u201cthat occurs when you abandon yourself to [the gentle current of time] and to whatever life brings.\u201d<\/p>\n Taken together Magris\u2019s essays share a clearly identified theme. They represent the motif of the journey in all its aspects\u2014literary, metaphysical, spiritual, mythical, philosophical, historical\u2014as well as the author\u2019s comprehensive understanding of the subject or, one might say, of his own way of being in the world. Traveling from Spain to Germany to Poland, Norway, Vietnam, Iran, and Australia, he records particular moments and places through a highly personal lens. A writer\u2019s writer and a reader\u2019s traveler, Magris proves that wandering is equal part wondering.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Yale University Press:<\/p>\n This historical novel by one of Spain\u2019s most celebrated authors weaves a tale of disparate time periods: the early years of the nineteenth century, when Francisco de Goya was at the height of his artistic career, and the final years of Generalissimo Franco\u2019s Fascist rule in the 1970s. Rojas re-creates the nineteenth-century corridors of power and portrays the relationship between Goya and King Fernando VII, a despot bent on establishing a cruel regime after Spain\u2019s War of Independence. Goya obliges the king\u2019s request for a portrait, but his depiction not only fails to flatter but reflects a terrible darkness and grotesqueness. More than a century later, transcending conventional time, Goya observes Franco\u2019s body lying in state and experiences again a dark and monstrous despair.<\/p>\n Rojas’s work is a dazzling tour de force, a unique combination of narrative invention and art historical expertise that only he could have brought to the page.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from New Directions:<\/p>\n The Linden Tree<\/em>\u00a0was written in 2003. In it the narrator, who could be Aira himself (born the same year, in the same place, a writer who is now also living PBK in Buenos Aires) revisits down his childhood memories. Beginning with an enigmatically beautiful black father who gathered linden flowers to make a sleep-inducing tea, and continuing on to an irrational and physically deformed mother of European descent, the narrator also catalogs his best childhood friends and the many gossiping neighbors. Aira creates a colorful mosaic of an epoch in Argentina when the poor, under the guiding hand of Eva Pero\u00b4n, aspired to a newfound middle class. Moving from anecdote to anecdote, alternating between the touching, amusing, and sometimes surreal, we are comforted by the fact that for Aira \u201ceverything is allegory.\u201d<\/p>\n This is a charming novella?evocative, reflexive, amusing, intelligent?that invites the reader to look further into Aira\u2019s great body of work.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Viking:<\/p>\n A masterful novel about the son of a great painter striving to create his own legacy, by the bestselling author of\u00a0The Imperfectionists.<\/i><\/p>\n Conceived while his father, Bear, cavorted around Rome in the 1950s, Pinch learns quickly that Bear’s genius trumps all. After Bear abandons his family, Pinch strives to make himself worthy of his father’s attention–first trying to be a painter himself; then resolving to write his father’s biography; eventually settling, disillusioned, into a job as an Italian teacher in London. But when Bear dies, Pinch hatches a scheme to secure his father’s legacy–and make his own mark on the world.<\/p>\n With his signature humanity and humor, Tom Rachman examines a life lived in the shadow of greatness, cementing his place among his generation’s most exciting literary voices.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Tomb-Song-683x1024.jpg?resize=300%2C450\")
Tomb Song<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Juli\u00e1n Herbert
\ntranslated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
\nGraywolf Press<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Awayland.jpg?resize=298%2C450\")
Awayland<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Ramona Ausubel
\nRiverhead Books<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Trick-658x1024.jpg?resize=289%2C450\")
Trick<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Domenico Starnone
\ntranslated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri
\nEuropa Editions<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Berlin-Alexanderplatz.jpg?resize=282%2C450\")
Berlin Alexanderplatz<\/i><\/b>
\nby Alfred D\u00f6blin
\ntranslated from the Germany by Michael Hofmann
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Cloudbursts.jpg?resize=302%2C450\")
Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Thomas McGuane
\nKnopf<\/p>\n
\nMarch 13<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/The-Right-Intention-672x1024.jpg?resize=295%2C450\")
The Right Intention<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Andr\u00e9s Barba
\ntranslated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman
\nTransit Books<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Heretics-682x1024.jpg?resize=353%2C530\")
Heretics<\/i><\/strong>
\nby Leonardo Padura
\ntranslated from the Spanish by Anna Kushner
\nFarrar, Straus and Giroux<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/The-Sparshold-Affair.jpg?resize=302%2C450\")
The Sparsholt Affair<\/i><\/strong>
\nby Alan Hollinghurst
\nKnopf<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/The-Life-to-Come-2-678x1024.jpg?resize=298%2C450\")
The Life to Come<\/i><\/strong>
\nby Michelle de Kretser
\nCatapult<\/p>\n
\nMarch 20<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Encircling-2.jpg?resize=296%2C450\")
Encircling 2: Origins<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Carl Frode Tiller
\ntranslated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland
\nGraywolf<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/Journeying.jpg?resize=291%2C450\")
Journeying<\/i><\/b>
\nby Claudio Magris
\ntranslated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel
\nYale University Press<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/The-Valley-of-the-Fallen.jpg?resize=291%2C450\")
The Valley of the Fallen<\/i><\/b>
\nby Carlos Rojas
\ntranslated from the Spanish by Edith Gorssman
\nYale University Press<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/The-Linden-Tree-731x1024.jpg?resize=321%2C450\"){kind=spacer}
The Linden Tree<\/i><\/b>
\nby C\u00e9sar Aira
\ntranslated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews
\nNew Directions<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/The-Italian-Teacher.jpg?resize=298%2C450\")
The Italian Teacher<\/i><\/b>
\nby Tom Rachman
\nViking<\/p>\n
\nMarch 27<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/The-Chandelier.jpg?resize=300%2C450\")
The Chandelier<\/strong><\/em>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/The-Solitary-Twin.jpg?resize=292%2C450\")
The Solitary Twin<\/strong><\/em>