The OF Blog: Some recently-purchased titles, some of which will be reviewed in the near future

Friday, May 09, 2014

Some recently-purchased titles, some of which will be reviewed in the near future

Received a huge paycheck today, so I placed aside about $200 for book purchases, some of which are more for the summer than May reading.  Here are the books that I have ordered, both today and during the past week, in case some of these titles might pique your fancy:

Gérard Chevallier, Fear (pre-order; May 20th release); La peur (French; 1930 novel on WWI; to be reviewed elsewhere later this year)

Robert Jackson Bennett, American Elsewhere (Shirley Jackson Award finalist)

Carlos Labbe, Navidad y esperanza (Spanish; saw this book mentioned on a few sites and I decided to read it in the original Spanish)

Ana Luisa Amaral, Imagens (Portuguese; poetry)

Max Brooks, The Harlem Hellfighters (graphic novel; story of famous WWI all-black regiment; planning on using this in the classroom next week; will review later in the year)

Danilo Kiš, Basta, pepeo (Serbian; English translation is Garden, Ashes)

Milorad Pavić, Hazarski Rečnik (Serbian; English translation is Dictionary of the Khazars)

Daša Drndić, Sonnenschein (Croatian); Trieste (this story that spans the 20th century is very, very good about halfway through.  Review likely later this month)

Dinaw Mengestu, All Our Names (one of the books I selected back in January for my to-read list for the year)

Howard Waldrop, Things will Never be the Same (reprint collection just released in e-book format)

Anne Carson, red doc> (prose poetry)

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (eds.), The Time Traveler's Almanac (slowly reading this, but enjoying it so far)

Rose Fox and Daniel José Older (eds.), Long Hidden:  Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (finished this Wednesday; might write more on it later, but it was a collection of good stories mixed with weaker ones that has left me trying to evaluate fairly the anthology as a whole)

Minae Mizumura, A True Novel (2014 Best Translated Book Award finalist for fiction; translated from Japanese)

Marie NDiaye, Three Strong Women (IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize finalist; finished it Tuesday and thought it was a solid translation and good story)

Sohrab Sepehri, The Oasis of Now (2014 Best Translated Book Award finalist for poetry; translated from Persian; very good)

Elena Biagini, L'ospite (Italian; poetry; in translation, this book formed half of the 2014 Best Translated Book Award winner for Poetry, The Guest in the Wood)


Based on what I've read so far, I seem to have several weeks' worth of excellent reads awaiting me.  Hopefully, some of these will make it onto your own purchase lists, whether in their original languages or in translation.

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