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Historically, English-language readers have been great fans of European literature, and names like Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Mann are so familiar we hardly think of them as foreign at all. What those writers brought to English-language literature was a wide variety of new ideas, styles, and ways of seeing the world. Yet times have changed, and how much do we even know about the richly diverse literature being written in Europe today?
Best...
2) Adam in Eden
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In this comic novel of political intrigue, Adam Gorozpe, a respected businessman in Mexico, has a life so perfect that he might as well be his namesake in the Garden of Eden-but there are snakes in this Eden too. For one thing, Adam's wife Priscila has fallen in love with the brash director of national security-also named Adam-who uses violence against token victims to hide the fact that he's letting drug runners, murderers, and kidnappers go free....
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First published in 1910, Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is one the first great modernist novels, the account of poet-aspirant Brigge in his exploration of poetic individuality and his reflections on the experience of time as death approaches. This translation by Burton Pike is a reaction to overly stylized previous translations, and aims to capture not only the beauty but also the strangeness, the spirit, of Rilke's German.
4) Solenoid
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English
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A highly-acclaimed master work of fiction from Cărtărescu, author of Blinding: an existence (and eventually a cosmos) created by forking paths.
Based on Cărtărescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the...
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One of the defining texts of twentieth-century Catalan fiction, written by one of its most innovative and cherished writers, Salvador Espriu's Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth is a collection of thirty-four short stories in which the twists and turns of action, character, and place are as winding and sumptuous as the legendary maze of its title. Originally published in 1935 in the midst of great countrywide political and social upheaval, these stories...
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A musty bar in off-season Cannon Beach, Oregon, provides the setting for an unsuspecting Frenchman's introduction to the many ways life can go wrong for the unlucky in America. He listens as the barflies nightly recount their tales of woe-betrayal, broken families, financial ruin. Though they seem at first to tolerate the newcomer's presence and sympathy, a tide of violence is rising, one he perceives only dimly until it is too late to escape. Made...
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The delightful and daring English-language debut of French author Hervé le Tellier is a series of short, intimately interconnected stories making up a lively user's manual to pleasure, relating the various liaisons of couples from Anna and Ben to Yolande and Zach (taking in Chloe and Xavier along the way, as well as twenty others, as you may have guessed), until the criss-crossing of their lives and partners makes up a pattern as intricate as the...
8) Mannequin
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English
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Ch'oe Yun's Mannequin is a novel that reflects on the meaning of beauty and its many facets of existence. The beauty of the main character, Jini, is captured through a carefree imagination that describes it as "the music of the wind," or something that can't be described in words. Through the beauty that penetrates and captivates us in fleeting moments, the novel leads us to critically reflect on the question of what true beauty is in a world where...
9) Natives
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English
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Having achieved professional success in Barcelona at the expense of family life, best friends Montse and Roser are dissatisfied and sexually frustrated. Over an evening cognac, the two friends hatch a plan to find one of Barcelona's many illegal African immigrants, whom they plan to employ as the object of their sexual desires. When Montse finds Bambara Keita on a park bench at the Plaza de Cataluña, she knows he is the one, and invites him home....
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In Self-Portrait Abroad, our narrator-a Belgian author much like Toussaint himself-travels the globe, finding the mundane blended everywhere with the exotic: With his usual poker face, he keeps up on Corsican gossip in Tokyo and has a battle of nerves in a butcher shop in Berlin; he wins a boules tournament in Cap Corse, takes in a strip club in Japan's historic Nara, gets pulled through Hanoi on a cycle rickshaw, and has a chance encounter on the...
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Originally published in 1926, King Goshawk and the Birds is the first installment of O'Duffy's Cuanduine trilogy, which also included The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street (1928) and Asses in Clover (1933). Set in a future world devastated by the development of capitalism, King Goshawk concerns the eponymous tyrant's attempt to buy all of the wildflowers and songbirds in Ireland, and the attempt by a Dublin philosopher as well as a number...
12) Origin Unknown
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Oliver Rohe's first novel is a word-crazed monologue in the mind of a man named Selber flying back to his war-torn native country for the first time in years. Grappling with his fear of flying and increasingly possessed by reminiscences of his long-dead childhood friend Roman, the narrator begins to wonder if any of his thoughts, or the decisions he has made in his life, are truly his own. From meditations upon loss, violence, repetition, and individuality,...
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In Search of the Grail continues Svetislav Basara’s Cyclist Conspiracy, a fantastical exploration of civilizational decline told through an array of strange and esoteric documents. Readers are introduced to a secret history of the twentieth century, shown that behind the well-known wars and political revolutions of the period numerous secret organizations vied for supremacy through the control of books, knowledge, and dreams. With appearances by...
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When John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse appeared in 1968, American fiction was turned on its head. Barth's writing was not a response to the realistic fiction that characterized American literature at the time; it beckoned back to the founders of the novel: Cervantes, Rabelais, and Sterne, echoing their playfulness and reflecting the freedom inherent in the writing of fiction.
This collection of Barth's short fiction is a landmark event, bringing all...
15) Jacob the Mutant
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Conceived of as a set of fragmentary manuscripts from an unpublished Joseph Roth novel, Jacob the Mutant is a novella in a perpetual state of transformation--a story about a man named Jacob, an ersatz rabbi and owner of a roadside tavern. But when reality shifts, so does Jacob, mutating into another person entirely.
16) Angel Station
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English
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Jachym Topol is the most-translated Czech author of his generation, lauded for his imaginative storytelling and his inventive use of language. Melding fiction and documentary, with a dash of black humor on the side, he zeroes in on the agonies and injustices of the totalitarian past, in his own country and throughout Central and Eastern Europe.
Angel Station takes its title from the bustling Metro stop in the Prague district of Smíchov. Until the...
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Who's really telling this story? That's the mystery at the heart of Danielle Mémoire's novel, which opens with a writer on stage at a public reading-a public reading that isn't one, because she never reads a word, much to the audience's annoyance. When an audience member finally heckles her, the writer's response sets off a chain reaction of nested stories that tumble one after another like a row of dominoes.
Each storyteller in the series (most...
18) The Sovereign
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13 October -01 and inching toward midnight, Lieutenant Frances Villegas sits at a Steinway trying desperately to play Stravinsky's Petrushka while the Colonel watches, wheezing from a wing chair. They are waiting on the enigmatic voice of the people, Adjutant General Arjún J. Joglar, due to arrive at any minute from Lares. Downstairs, Baldomero Richter, presiding over a captive body stripped bare of clothes, hair, genitals, and one ear, awaits an...
19) Dukla
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At several points in the haunting Dukla, Andrzej Stasiuk claims that what he is trying to do is "write a book about light." The result is a beautiful, lyrical series of evocations of a very specific locale at different times of the year, in different kinds of weather, and with different human landscapes. Dukla, in fact, is a real place: a small resort town not far from where Stasiuk now lives. Taking an usual form-a short essay, a novella, and then...
20) Job-Boj
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Written in alternating voices, Jorge Guzman's JOB BOJ is a captivating novel that explores the progression from melancholy to happiness, or vice versa. The delicate interplay between a light-hearted narrator and a brooding, introspective one draws the reader in to question identity. Are they the same man? Two different periods from the same life? Or are they two separate people? The reader is left to judge. While the novel is a superb masterclass...
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