An especially impressive string of good fortune has come in the mail lately-- books, magazines, and literary journals that I cannot wait to read and cannot resist giving shout-outs to before I even begin them. Among the loot that has best caught my attention:
Best European Fiction 2010. Edited by Aleksandar Hemon; introduction by Zadie Smith (Dalkey Archive)
From the press materials:
Best European Fiction 2010 is the inaugural installment of what will become an annual anthology of stories from across Europe. Edited by acclaimed Bosnian novelist and MacArthur “Genius-Award” winner Aleksandar Hemon, and with dozens of editorial, media, and programming partners in the U.S., UK, and Europe, the Best European Fiction series will be a window onto what’s happening right now in literary scenes throughout Europe, where the next Kafka, Flaubert, or Mann is waiting to be discovered.
For all the editorial chaos in the magazine's office, they are still putting out a beautiful literary journal, full of art, photography, and a lot of outstanding voices on the pages.
The Sun: January 2010 issue
Gorgeous, as always, and includes writing by Tatjana Soli, Linda Hogan, Laura Pritchett, and an interview with Susan Steingarber on the environment and health. Readers Write section focuses on "Narrow Escapes."
If There is Something to Desire: 100 Poems, by Vera Pavlova; trans. by Steven Seymour (Knopf)
This is the first full-length collection in English of one of Russia's bestselling poets. Her work has so far been translated into nineteen languages; the English versions come courtesy of her husband, Steven Seymour. Pavlova's poems have appeared in The New Yorker and Tin House, as well as New York City's "Poetry in Motion" initiative.
I have an interview with Pavlova forthcoming for The Women's International Perspective.
The Glass Room, by Simon Mawer (Other Press)
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Mawer's book is described by The Guardian as "a thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry... a novel of ideas, yet
strongly propelled by plot and characterised by an almost dreamlike
simplicity of telling."
Meanwhile, The Washington Post review says that the novel works "so effectively because Mawer embeds...provocative aesthetic and moral issues in a war-torn adventure story that’s eerily erotic and tremendously exciting....[a] gorgeous novel.”
So that all sounds good ...
The Old Garden, by Hwang Sok-Yong (Seven Stories)
From the press materials:
Political prisoner Hyun Woo is freed after eighteen years to find no trace of the world he knew. The friends with whom he shared utopianist dreams are gone. His Seoul is unrecognizably transformed and aggressively modernized. Yoon Hee, the woman he loved, died three years ago. A broken man, he drifts toward a small house in Kalmoe, where he and Yoon Hee once stole a few fleeting months of happiness while fleeing the authorities. In the company of her diaries, he relives and reviews his life, trying to find meaning in the revolutionary struggle that consumed their youth—a youth of great energy and optimism, victim to implacable history.
Hyun Woo weighs the worth of his own life, spent in prison, and that of the strong-willed artist Yoon Hee, whose involvement in rebel groups took her to Berlin and the fall of the wall. With great poignancy, Hwang Sok-Yong grapples with the immortal questions—the endurance of love, the price of a commitment to causes—while depicting a generation that sacrificed youth, liberty, and often life, for the dream of a better tomorrow.
I'll be reviewing this book for an upcoming issue of The Collagist.
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