Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from NYRB Classics:<\/p>\n Castle Gripsholm<\/i>, the best and most beloved work by Kurt Tucholsky, is a short novel about an enchanted summer holiday. It begins with an assignment: Tucholsky\u2019s publisher wants him to write something light and funny, otherwise about whatever Tucholsky wants. A deal is struck and the story is off: about Peter, a writer; his girlfriend, known as the Princess; and a summer vacation far from the hurly-burly of Berlin. Peter and the Princess have rented a small house attached to a historic castle in Sweden, and they have five weeks of long days and white nights at their disposal; five weeks for swimming and walking and sex and talking and visits with Peter\u2019s buddy Karlchen and with Billy, the Princess\u2019s best friend. It is perfect, until they meet a weeping girl fleeing the cruel headmistress of a home for children. The vacationers decide they must free the girl and send her back to her mother in Switzerland, which brings about an encounter with authority that casts a worrying shadow over their radiant summer idyll. Soon they must return to Germany. What kind of fairy tale are they living in?<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from NYRB Classics:<\/p>\n My Friends<\/em> is Emmanuel Bove\u2019s first and most famous book, and it begins simply, though unusually, enough: \u201cWhen I wake up, my mouth is open. My teeth are furry: it would be better to brush them in the evening, but I am never brave enough.\u201d Victor Baton is speaking, and he is a classic little man, of no talent or distinction or importance and with no illusions that he has any of those things, either; in fact, if he is exceptional, it is that life\u2019s most basic transactions seem to confound him more than they do the rest of us. All Victor wants is to be loved, all he wants is a friend, and as he strays through the streets of Paris in search of love or friendship or some fleeting connection, we laugh both at Victor\u2019s meekness and at his odd pride, but we feel with him, too. Victor is after all a kind of everyman, the indomitable knight of human fragility. And, in spite of everything, he, or at least his creator, is some kind of genius, investing the back streets and rented rooms of the city and the unsorted moments of daily life with a weird and unforgettable clarity.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Farrar, Straus and Giroux:<\/p>\n In Chia-Chia Lin\u2019s debut novel, The Unpassing<\/i>, we meet a Taiwanese immigrant family of six struggling to make ends meet on the outskirts of Anchorage, Alaska. The father, hardworking but beaten down, is employed as a plumber and repairman, while the mother, a loving, strong-willed, and unpredictably emotional matriarch, holds the house together. When ten-year-old Gavin contracts meningitis at school, he falls into a deep, nearly fatal coma. He wakes up a week later to learn that his little sister Ruby was infected, too. She did not survive.<\/p>\n Routine takes over for the grieving family: the siblings care for each other as they befriend a neighboring family and explore the woods; distance grows between the parents as they deal with their loss separately. But things spiral when the father, increasingly guilt ridden after Ruby\u2019s death, is sued for not properly installing a septic tank, which results in grave harm to a little boy. In the ensuing chaos, what really happened to Ruby finally emerges.<\/p>\n With flowing prose that evokes the terrifying beauty of the Alaskan wilderness, Lin explores the fallout after the loss of a child and the way in which a family is forced to grieve in a place that doesn\u2019t yet feel like home. Emotionally raw and subtly suspenseful, The Unpassing<\/i> is a deeply felt family saga that dismisses the American dream for a harsher, but ultimately more profound, reality.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Knopf:<\/p>\n Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell’s murderer was acquitted–thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the Reverend.<\/p>\n Sitting in the audience during the vigilante’s trial was Harper Lee, who had traveled from New York City to her native Alabama with the idea of writing her own In Cold Blood,<\/i> the true-crime classic she had helped her friend Truman Capote research seventeen years earlier. Lee spent a year in town reporting, and many more years working on her own version of the case.<\/p>\n Now Casey Cep brings this story to life, from the shocking murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South. At the same time, she offers a deeply moving portrait of one of the country’s most beloved writers and her struggle with fame, success, and the mystery of artistic creativity.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Knopf:<\/p>\n Karen Russell\u2019s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories.\u00a0 In\u201cBog Girl\u201d, a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a two thousand year old girl that he\u2019s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog.\u00a0 In \u201cThe Prospectors,\u201d two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives.\u00a0 In the brilliant, hilarious title story, a new mother desperate to ensure her infant\u2019s safety strikes a diabolical deal, agreeing to breastfeed the devil in exchange for his protection. The landscape in which these stories unfold is a feral, slippery, purgatorial space, bracketed by the void\u2014yet within it Russell captures the exquisite beauty and tenderness of ordinary life. Orange World<\/i> is a miracle of storytelling from a true modern master.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from NYRB Classics:<\/p>\n Late in the seventeenth century, Robert Kirk, an Episcopalian minister in the Scottish Highlands, set out to collect his parishioners\u2019 many striking stories about elves, fairies, fauns, doppelg\u00e4ngers, wraiths, and other beings of, in Kirk\u2019s words, \u201ca middle nature betwixt man and angel.\u201d For Kirk these stories constituted strong evidence for the reality of a supernatural world, existing parallel to ours, which, he passionately believed, demanded exploration as much as the New World across the seas. Kirk defended these views in The Secret Commonwealth<\/i>, an essay that was left in manuscript when he died in 1692. It is a rare and fascinating work, an extraordinary amalgam of science, religion, and folklore, suffused with the spirit of active curiosity and bemused wonder that fills Robert Burton\u2019s Anatomy of Melancholy<\/i> and the works of Sir Thomas Browne. The Secret Commonwealth<\/i> is not only a remarkable document in the history of ideas but a study of enchantment that enchants in its own right.<\/p>\n First published in 1815 by Sir Walter Scott, then reedited in 1893 by Andrew Lang, with a dedication to Robert Louis Stevenson, The Secret Commonwealth<\/i> has long been difficult to obtain\u2014available, if at all, only in scholarly editions. This new edition modernizes the spelling and punctuation of Kirk\u2019s little book and features a wide-ranging and illuminating introduction by the critic and historian Marina Warner, who brings out the originality of Kirk\u2019s contribution and reflects on the ongoing life of fairies in the modern mind.<\/p>\n Buy from Amazon.com here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here is the blurb from Open Letter Books:<\/p>\n By blinking his eyes and moving his pupils, a paraplegic man\u2014the onetime vocalist in a famous rock band\u2014composes a kind of anti-biography that is corrected and expanded upon by an unknown editor. Alternating between the vocalist’s impressionistic recollections and the editor’s “corrections,” an asynchronous story emerges, evoking the vocalist’s childhood in southern Chile and telling of the rise and fall of the band that he grew up to lead, while hinting at a multiplicity of other narrative possibilities.<\/p>\n At once an exploration of collection creation as a kind of real community and a reflection on the fragility of memory, Spiritual Choreographies<\/em> is an undaunted and entirely original novel by one of Latin America’s most innovative contemporary writers, whose body of work has been described as “a response to the imminent destruction of the known world.”<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Castle-Gripsholm.jpg?resize=281%2C450\")
Castle Gripsholm<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Kurt Tucholsky
\ntranslated from the German by Michael Hofmann
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/My-Friends.jpg?resize=281%2C450\")
My Friends<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Emmanuel Bove
\ntranslated from the French by Janet Louth
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/The-Unpassing.jpg?resize=294%2C450\")
The Unpassing<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Chia-Chia Lin
\nFarrar, Straus and Giroux<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Furious-Hours.jpg?resize=302%2C450\")
Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Latest Trial of Harper Lee<\/strong><\/em>
\nby Casey Cep
\nKnopf<\/p>\n
\nMay 14<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Orange-World.jpg?resize=305%2C450\")
Orange World and Other Stories
\n<\/strong><\/em>by Karen Russell
\nKnopf<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/The-Secret-Commonwealth.jpg?resize=281%2C450\")
The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies
\n<\/strong><\/em>by Robert Kirk
\nNYRB Classics<\/p>\n
\nMay 21<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Spiritual-Choreographies.jpg?resize=291%2C450\")
Spiritual Choreographies
\n<\/strong><\/em>by Carlos Labb\u00e9
\ntranslated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden
\nOpen Letter Books<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/The-Organs-of-Sense.jpg?resize=298%2C450\")
The Organs of Sense![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Springtime-in-a-Broken-Mirror.jpg?resize=291%2C450\")
Springtime in a Broken Mirror