Taking place in 1954, The Stony Heart concerns a man gathering documents for a study of a historian, and in the course of his search he gets involved with a woman who is married to a man who is invol
Hailed as "the best comic fantasy since Tristram Shandy" upon its publication in 1964, The Dalkey Archive is Flann O'Brien's fifth and final novel; or rather (as O'Brien wrote to his editor), "The bo
The Flemish writer DanieI^l Robberechts (1937–1992) refused to identify his books as novels, stories, or essays, according them all equal status as, simply, writing. This liberation from genre
This collection of sharp, spare, occasionally absurd, cruel, touching, and yet always generous short-short fictions addresses the fundamental difficulty we have in making the people we love understan
Though it has a lovely name, the real “Island of Dreams” is actually a hunk of reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay where the city dumps its garbage . . . and yet, Shozo Saka, a middle-aged widowe
Boris Pahor spent the last fourteen months of World War II as a prisoner and medic in the Nazi camps at Belsen, Harzungen, Dachau, and Natzweiler. His fellow prisoners comprised a veritable microcosm
Susan Sontag writes: “Of the novelists I have discovered in translation . . . the three for whom I have the greatest admiration are Gabriel GarciI?a MaI?rquez, Peter Handke, and Yoram Kaniuk.&l
The “friction” of the title—one letter away from “fiction”—is what’s generated when reality and the imagination begin to rub against one another, and Eloy Ur
There are no heroes in IgnaI?cio de Loyola BrandaI?o’s world, only victims: not only of violence, but of deceit, desire, and fear. In The Good-Bye Angel, BrandaI?o returns to his great subject:
Tells the story of privileged, handsome, and totally lost Stuart Byrne, who finds himself trying to survive an emotional crisis of emptiness and lack of purpose by creating a life of excess and promis
Gruesome, unhinged, and hilarious, Dolly City is widelyrecognized as one of the most disconcerting—andbrilliant—literary works ever to come out of Israel.
Take several genre novels telling similar stories of love and death---a spy novel, a romance, an adventure tale---mix them together so that items and images from each start popping up in the others,
The Review of Contemporary Fiction was founded in 1981 to promote a vision of literary culturethat is not limited to the immediately popular, and to ensure that important world writers outside popula
Chromos is one of the true masterpieces of post-World War II fiction. Written in the 1940s but left unpublished until 1990, it anticipated the fictional inventiveness of the writers who were to come a
Published posthumously in 1995, Mrs. Ted Bliss tells the story of an eighty-two-year-old widow starting life anew after the death of her husband. As Dorothy Bliss learns to cope with the mundane ritua
The Review of Contemporary Fiction was founded in 1981 to promote a vision of literary culture that is not limited to the immediately popular, and to ensure that important world writers outside popula