Interesting New Books — 2012

Note: publishers change their schedules a lot. Release dates can and will change.

January

The Break by Pietro Grossi

Release date: January 1
Publisher: Pushkin Press

The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq

Release date: January 3
Publisher: Knopf

Religio Medici and Urne-Burial by Sir Thomas Browne

Release date: January 10
Publisher: NYRB Classics

The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus

Release date: January 17
Publisher: Knopf

Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts by William H. Gass

Release date: January 17
Publisher: Knopf
It begins with the personal, both past and present, emphasizing Gass’s lifelong attachment to books, and moves on to the more analytical as he ponders the work of some of his favorite writers, their themes, and their lives (among them Kafka, Nietzsche, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Proust), and a few topics equally burning but less loved (Knut Hamsun; the Holocaust). He then focuses on form and metaphor, and finally, ponders more theoretical matters connected with literature, specifically one of its genetic parts–the sentence.

Berlin Stories by Robert Walser

Release date: January 24
Publisher: NYRB Classics
In 1905 the young Swiss writer Robert Walser arrived in Berlin to join his older brother Karl, already an important stage-set designer, and immediately threw himself into the vibrant social and cultural life of the city. Berlin Stories collects his alternately celebratory, droll, and satirical observations on every aspect of the bustling German capital, from its theaters, cabarets, painters’ galleries, and literary salons, to the metropolitan street, markets, the Tiergarten, rapid-service restaurants, and the electric tram. Originally appearing in literary magazines as well as the feuilleton sections of newspapers, the early stories are characterized by a joyous urgency and the generosity of an unconventional guide. Later pieces take the form of more personal reflections on the writing process, memories, and character studies. All are full of counter-intuitive images and vignettes of startling clarity, showcasing a unique talent for whom no detail was trivial, at grips with a city diving headlong into modernity.

Pale Blue Ink in a Lady’s Hand by Franz Werfel

Release date: January 31
Publisher: Godine

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel

Release date: January 31
Publisher: Godine

February

Varamo by Cesar Aira

Release date: February
Publisher: New Directions

Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Release date: February
Publisher: New Directions

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories by Nathan Englander

Release date: February 7
Publisher: Knopf

Men in Space by Tom McCarthy

Release date: February 14
Publisher: Vintage

Prehistoric Times by Eric Chevillard

Release date: February 14
Publisher: Archipelago Books

Mathematique by Jacques Roubaud

Release date: February 14
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room by Geoff Dyer

Release date: February 21
Publisher: Pantheon

Dogma by Lars Iyer

Release date: February 21
Publisher: Melville House

The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata

Release date: February 27
Publisher: Norton
How negotiable is a fact in nonfiction? In 2003, an essay by John D’Agata was rejected by the magazine that commissioned it due to factual inaccuracies. That essay—which eventually became the foundation of D’Agata’s critically acclaimed About a Mountain—was accepted by another magazine, The Believer, but not before they handed it to their own fact-checker, Jim Fingal. What resulted from that assignment was seven years of arguments, negotiations, and revisions as D’Agata and Fingal struggled to navigate the boundaries of literary nonfiction. This book reproduces D’Agata’s essay, along with D’Agata and Fingal’s extensive correspondence. What emerges is a brilliant and eye-opening meditation on the relationship between “truth” and “accuracy” and a penetrating conversation about whether it is appropriate for a writer to substitute one for the other.

March

Autoportrait by Edouard Leve

Release date: March
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
In this brilliant and sobering self-portrait, Edouard Levé hides nothing from his readers, setting out his entire life, more or less at random, in a string of declarative sentences. Autoportrait is a physical, psychological, sexual, political, and philosophical triumph. Beyond “sincerity,” Levé works toward an objectivity so radical it could pass for crudeness, triviality, even banality: the author has stripped himself bare. With the force of a set of maxims or morals, Levé’s prose seems at first to be an autobiography without sentiment, as though written by a machine—until, through the accumulation of detail, and the author’s dry, quizzical tone, we find ourselves disarmed, enthralled, and enraptured by nothing less than the perfect fiction . . . made entirely of facts.

The Sickness by Alberto Barrera Tyszka

Release date: March 13
Publisher: Tin House
Dr. Miranda is faced with a tragedy: his father has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and has only a few weeks to live. He is also faced with a dilemma: How does one tell his father he is dying? Ernesto Duran, a patient of Dr. Miranda’s, is convinced he is sick. Ever since he separated from his wife he has been presenting symptoms of an illness he believes is killing him. It becomes an obsession far exceeding hypochondria. The fixation, in turn, has its own creeping effect on Miranda’s secretary, who cannot, despite her best intentions, resist compassion for the man. A profound and philosophical exploration of the nature and meaning of illness, Alberto Barrera Tyszka’s tender, refined novel interweaves the stories of four individuals as they try, in their own way, to come to terms with sickness in all its ubiquity.

Harlequin’s Millions by Bohumil Hrabal

Release date: March 13
Publisher: Archipelago Books
In this moving, absorbing novel, we meet the eccentric residents of a home for the elderly who reminisce about their lives and their changing country. Written with a keen eye for the absurd and peppered with dialogue that captures the poignancy of the everyday, Harlequin’s Millions is a sensual delight.

The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir by Claude Lanzmann

Release date: March 13
Publisher: FSG
Born to a Jewish family in Paris in 1925, Claude Lanzmann’s first encounter with radicalism was as part of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation. He and his father were soldiers of the underground until the end of the war, smuggling arms and making raids on the German army. After the liberation of France, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, making money by dressing as a priest and collecting donations and by stealing books from bookshops. It was in Paris that he met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. It was a life-changing meeting. The young Lanzmann began a seven-year affair with the older de Beauvoir. He became the editor of Sartre’s political-literary journal, Les Temps Modernes—a position that he holds to this day—and came to know the most important literary and philosophical figures of postwar France. And all this before he was thirty years old. Written in precise, rich prose of rare beauty, organized—like human memory—in interconnected fragments that eschew conventional chronology, and describing in detail the making of his seminal film Shoah, The Patagonian Hare is a work of art, more significant and more ambitious than mere memoir. In it, Lanzmann has created a love song to life balanced by the eye of a true auteur.

April

Conversations with David Foster Wallace

Release date: April 1
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi

Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001 by W.G. Sebald

Release date: April 3
Publisher: Random House
Skillfully translated by Iain Galbraith, the nearly one hundred poems in Across the Land and the Water range from those Sebald wrote as a student in the sixties to those completed right before his untimely death in 2001. Featuring eighty-eight poems published in English for the first time and thirty-three from unpublished manuscripts, this collection also brings together all the verse he placed in books and journals during his lifetime. Here are Sebald’s trademark themes—from nature and history (“Events of war within/a life cracks/across the Order of the World/spreading from Cassiopeia/a diffuse pain reaching into/the upturned leaves on the trees”), to wandering and wondering (“I have even begun/to speak in foreign tongues/roaming like a nomad in my own/town . . .”), to oblivion and memory (“If you knew every cranny/of my heart/you would yet be ignorant/of the pain my happy/memories bring”).

As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 by Susan Sontag

Release date: April 10
Publisher: FSG
This, the second of three volumes of Susan Sontag’s journals and notebooks, begins where the first volume left off, in the middle of the 1960s. It traces and documents Sontag’s evolution from fledgling participant in the artistic and intellectual world of New York City to world-renowned critic and dominant force in the world of ideas with the publication of the groundbreaking Against Interpretation in 1966.

Reticence by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Release date: April 10
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
“A little thing happened to me. Which could have just as easily happened to you. You’re on vacation in a hotel with your son in a small village and you’re about to go see some friends, but something holds you back, a mysterious reticence that prevents you from going to find them. Here is the novel of this reticence, small and specific, and of the fears that it instigates, little by little. Because not only are your friends not there when you do decide to go find them, but, several days later, you find a dead cat in the harbor, a black cat floating in front of you on the water . . .” In Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s take on the detective novel, we find a man on vacation in a tiny village, where a writer named Biaggi appears to be keeping him under surveillance. To what end? Ah, but it’s far more pleasant to enjoy the Mediterranean night air than to look for answers, make deductions, or get upset—isn’t it?

The Secret of Evil by Roberto Bolano

Release date: April 17
Publisher: New Directions
A collection that gathers everything Bolaño was working on before his untimely death. A North American journalist in Paris is woken at 4 a.m. by a mysterious caller with urgent information. For V. S. Naipaul the prevalence of sodomy in Argentina is a symptom of the nation’s political ills. Daniela de Montecristo (familiar to readers of Nazi Literature in the Americas and 2666) recounts the loss of her virginity. Arturo Belano returns to Mexico City and meets the last disciples of Ulises Lima, who play in a band called The Asshole of Morelos. Belano’s son Gerónimo disappears in Berlin during the Days of Chaos in 2005. Memories of a return to the native land. Argentine writers as gangsters. Zombie schlock as allegory . . .

Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature by Daniel Levin Becker

Release date: April 24
Publisher: Harvard University Press
The youngest member of the Paris-based experimental collective Oulipo, Levin Becker tells the story of one of literature’s quirkiest movements—and the personal quest that led him to seek out like-minded writers, artists, and scientists who are obsessed with language and games, and who embrace formal constraints to achieve literature’s potential.

May

Antigonick by Anne Carson

Release date: May 10
Publisher: New Directions
With text blocks hand-inked on the page by Anne Carson and her collaborator Robert Currie, Antigonick features translucent vellum pages with stunning drawings by Bianca Stone that overlay the text. Anne Carson has published translations of the ancient Greek poets Sappho, Simonides, Aiskhylos, Sophokles and Euripides. Antigonick is her first attempt at making translation into a combined visual and textual experience. Sophokles’ luminous and disturbing tragedy is here given an entirely fresh language and presentation. Thoroughly delightful.

Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise

Release date: May 31
Publisher: Continuum
A groundbreaking collection that studies noise not merely as a sonic phenomenon but as an essential component of all communication and information systems.

The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou

Release date: May 31
Publisher: University of Iowa Press

June

Brenner and God by Wolf Haas

Release date: June 5
Publisher: Melville House Press
Wolf Haas’ Detective Brenner series has become wildly popular around the world for a reason: They’re timely, edgy stories told in a wry, quirky voice that’s often hilarious, and with a protagonist it’s hard not to love. In this episode, Brenner—forced out of the police force—tries to get away from detective work by taking a job as the personal chauffeur for two-year-old Helena, the daughter of a Munich construction giant and a Viennese abortion doctor. One day, while Brenner’s attention is turned to picking out a chocolate bar for Helena at a gas station, Helena gets snatched from the car. Abruptly out of a job, Brenner decides to investigate her disappearance on his own. With both parents in the public eye, there’s no scarcity of leads—the father’s latest development project has spurred public protest, and the mother’s clinic has been targeted by the zealous leader of an anti-abortion group. Brenner and God is told with a dark humor that leaves no character, including Brenner, unscathed. Haas tells the story of a fallible hero who can be indecisive and world-weary, baffled and disillusioned by what he finds, but who presses forward nonetheless out of a stubborn sense of decency—a two-year-old is kidnapped, so you find her, because that’s just what you do.

The Dream of the Celt by Mario Vargas Llosa

Release date: June 5
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
In 1916, the Irish nationalist Roger Casement was hanged by the British government for treason. Casement had dedicated his extraordinary life to improving plight of oppressed peoples around the world—especially the native populations in the Belgian Congo and the Amazon—but when he dared to draw a parallel between the injustices he witnessed in African and American colonies and those committed by the British in Northern Ireland, he became involved in a cause that led to his imprisonment and execution. Ultimately, the scandals surrounding Casement’s trial and eventual hanging tainted his image to such a degree that his pioneering human rights work wasn’t fully reexamined until the 1960s.

James Joyce: A New Biography by Gordon Bowker

Release date: June 5
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
James Joyce was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, but he was not immediately recognized as such. At twenty-two he chose a life of exile in cosmopolitan Europe in a bid to escape the suffocating atmosphere and parochial prejudices of his native Dublin. His life followed the classic “flight into exile” path taken by so many creative writers. His relationship with Nora Barnacle long aroused curious fascination, not least since—scandalously for the time—they lived together for twenty-seven years before marrying in 1931. Joyce’s unstinting dedication to authorship picks him out as a writer in the romantic tradition. He battled against poverty and financial dependency for much of his adult life. He suffered, too, the slings and arrows of uncomprehending critics. Ulysses, now widely regarded as the most innovative and influential of modernist texts, immediately ran into trouble with the censors of both Britain and America after it was published in Paris in 1922. Drawing on new material that has only recently come to light, Gordon Bowker’s biography ventures beyond the exterior life to explore the inner landscape of an extraordinary writer who continues to influence and fascinate over a century after his birth.

The Walk by Robert Walser

Release date: June 5
Publisher: New Directions

Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl by Tiqqun

Release date: June 8
Publisher: Semiotext(e)
First published in France in 1999, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl dissects the impossibility of love under Empire. The Young-Girl is consumer society’s total product and model citizen: whatever “type” of Young-Girl she may embody, whether by whim or concerted performance, she can only seduce by consuming. Filled with the language of French women’s magazines, rooted in Proust’s figure of Albertine and the amusing misery of (teenage) romance in Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, and informed by Pierre Klossowski’s notion of “living currency” and libidinal economy, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl diagnoses — and makes visible — a phenomenon that is so ubiquitous as to have become transparent.

Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas

Release date: June 7
Publisher: New Directions
One night, a renowned and now retired literary publisher has a vivid dream that takes place in Dublin, a city he’s never visited. The central scene of the dream is a funeral in the era of Ulysses. The publisher would give anything to know if an unidentified character in his dream is the great author he always wanted to meet, or the ghostly angel who abandoned him during childhood. As the days go by, he will come to understand that his vision of the end of an era was prophetic. Enrique Vila-Matas traces a journey that connects the worlds of Joyce and Beckett, revealing the difficulties faced by literary authors, publishers, and good readers in a society where literature is losing influence. A robust work, Dublinesque is a masterwork of irony, humor, and erudition by one of Spain’s most celebrated living authors.

July

Faction by Juan Filloy

Release date: July 10
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
The second of Argentinean eccentric Juan Filloy’s novels to be translated into English—after Op Oloop—Faction tells the story of seven erudite, homeless, and semi-incompetent radicals traveling from city to city in an attempt to foment a revolution: conspiring with striking workers, setting off bombs, and evading the local authorities. But this is no political thriller. Like his literary “descendant” Julio Cortázar—who mentions this book in Hopscotch—Filloy is far more concerned with his characters’ occasionally farcical inner lives than with their machinations. While the action might seem to have a fairly straight forward trajectory, the story meanders wherever it pleases, from the increasingly paranoid theories of its seven protagonists to the peculiar countermeasures taken by the regime they are trying to topple. With its almost encyclopedic feel,and its satirical look at both solidarity and nonconformity, Faction is considered to be among Filloy’s greatest achievements.

Vlad by Carlos Fuentes

Release date: July 24
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
“Vlad” is Vlad the Impaler, of course, whose mythic cruelty was an inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In this sly sequel, Vlad really is undead: dispossessed after centuries of mayhem by Eastern European wars and rampant blood shortages. More than a postmodern riff on “the vampire craze,” Vlad is also an anatomy of the Mexican bourgeoisie, as well as our culture’s ways of dealing with death. For—as in Dracula—Vlad has need of both a lawyer and a real-estate agent in order to establish his new kingdom, and Yves Navarro and his wife Asunción fit the bill nicely. Having recently lost a son, might they not welcome the chance to see their remaining child live forever? More importantly, are the pleasures of middle-class life enough to keep one from joining the legions of the damned?

August

The Lute and the Scars by Danilo Kis

Release date: August 21
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Written between 1980 and 1986, the six stories that constitute The Lute and the Scars (as well as an untitled piece by the author, included here as “A and B”) were transcribed from the manuscripts left by Danilo Kiš following his death in 1989. Like the title story, many of these texts are autobiographical. Others resurrect protagonists belonging to Kiš’s fellow Central European novelists, allowing readers to identify, perhaps, depending on the level of obfuscation, fantasy,and historical accuracy, figures dreamed up by Ödön von Horváth and Endre Ady (“The Stateless”), by the Yugoslavian Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić (“Debt”), and by Piotr Rawicz.

September

Nice Weather: Poems by Frederick Seidel

Release date: September 4
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Frederick Seidel—the “ghoul” (Chicago Review), the “triumphant outsider” (Contemporary Poetry Review)—returns with a dangerous new collection of poems. Nice Weather presents the sexual and political themes that have long preoccupied Seidel—and thrilled and offended his readers. Lyrical, grotesque, elegiac, this book adds new music and menace to his masterful body of work.

October

The Heart Broke In by James Meek

Release date: October 2
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Ritchie Shepherd, aging former pop star and wildly successful producer of a reality teen talent show, is starting to trip over the intricacy of his own lies. Gallingly, his sister, Bec, a scientist developing a crucial vaccine, is as addicted to truth-telling as Ritchie is to falsehood. Ritchie relies on her certitude even as he seethes with resentment. A devastating chain of events is set into motion when Bec tells her fiancé, Val, a powerful tabloid editor, that she can’t bring herself to marry him after all. Val has set himself up as the moral arbiter of the nation, which will turn out to be impeccable camouflage for an elaborate revenge plot intended to destroy Bec by exposing the people who are close to her—which now include Alex, a brilliant researcher in gene therapies who is so desperate to have a family of his own that Bec finds herself willing to lie and cheat in order to get him what he wants.

The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira by César Aira

Release date: October 16
Publisher: New Directions
César Aira’s newest novel in English is not about a conventional doctor. Single,in his forties, and poor, Dr. Aira is a skeptic. His personality — his weaknesses,whims, and pet peeves — is summed up in a series of digressions and regressions but he has a very special gift for miracles. He no longer cares about miracles,however, and has no faith in them. Perhaps he is even a little ashamed about his supernatural powers. Such is Dr. Aira, who also has to confront his arch-enemy— chief of the Piñero Hospital, Dr. Actyn — who is constantly trying to prove that Dr. Aira is a charlatan. Poor Dr. Aira is indeed a worker of miracles, but César Aira — the magesterial author — sends the very human doctor stumbling toward the biggest trap of all, in this magical book.

La Folie Baudelaire by Roberto Calasso

Release date: October 16
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Seen together, Roberto Calasso’s books—beginning with The Ruin of Kasch—constitute an original and perceptive reconsideration of the great arc of literature, art, and mythology. In this lavishly illustrated book, Calasso turns his attention to the poets and writers of Paris in the nineteenth century who created what was later called “the Modern.” His protagonist is Charles Baudelaire: poet of “nerves,” art lover, pioneering critic, man about Paris. Calasso ranges through Baudelaire’s life and work, focusing on two painters—Ingres and Delacroix—about whom Baudelaire wrote acutely, and then turning to Degas and Manet, who followed in the tracks Baudelaire laid down in his great essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” In a mosaic of stories, insights, close readings of poems, and commentaries on paintings, Baudelaire’s Paris comes to life. In the eighteenth century, a folie was a garden pavilion set aside for people of leisure, a place of delight and fantasy. Following Baudelaire, Calasso has created a brilliant and dramatic “Folie Baudelaire”—a place where the reader can encounter Baudelaire, his peers, his city, and his extraordinary likes and dislikes, finally discovering that it was to become nothing less than the land of “absolute literature.”

The Fun Stuff by James Wood

Release date: October 30
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Following The Broken Estate, The Irresponsible Self, and How Fiction Works—books that established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation—The Fun Stuff confirms Wood’s preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of the contemporary novel. In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches—that range over such crucial writers as Thomas Hardy, Leon Tolstoy, Edmund Wilson, and Mikhail Lermontov—Wood offers a panoramic look at the modern novel. He effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally in-depth analysis of the most important authors writing today, including Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, Aleksandar Hemon, and Michel Houellebecq. Included in The Fun Stuff are the title essay on Keith Moon and the lost joys of drumming—which was a finalist for last year’s National Magazine Awards—as well as Wood’s essay on George Orwell, which Christopher Hitchens selected for the Best American Essays 2010. The Fun Stuff is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about contemporary literature.

November

Woes of the True Policeman by Roberto Bolano

Release date: November 13
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Begun in the 1980s and worked on until the author’s death in 2003, Woes of the True Policeman is Roberto Bolaño’s last, unfinished, novel. The novel follows Amalfitano—exiled Chilean university professor and widower with a teenage daughter—as his political disillusionment and love of poetry lead to the scandal that will force him to flee from Barcelona and take him to Santa Teresa, Mexico. It is here, in this border town—haunted by dark tales of murdered women and populated by characters like Sorcha, who fought in the Andalusia Blue Division in the Spanish Civil War, and Castillo, who makes his living selling his forgeries of Larry Rivers paintings to wealthy Texans—that Amalfitano meets Arcimboldi, a magician and writer whose work highlights the provisional and fragile nature of literature and life.