The Big Clock Kenneth Fearing

New York Review Books

This is probably the kind of book I should've been reading all along. Good, hardboiled, old-timey detective shenanigans. A woman is murdered! The man leading the investigation has been tasked with finding... himself! How does he prove he didn't do it? Snappy dialogue, that's how. Chapters rove from character to character in 1st person perspective, a pretty interesting move, I feel like, for a detective novel at the time. A good palate cleanser that doesn't leave you feeling like an idiot.

Annie John Jamaica Kincaid

FSG

A short book, dreamy with memory, like a stenographer in an old folks' home. It's almost simple in its set-up: a young girl growing up in Antigua, going to school, making friends, living with her mother and father. That's all that this book is about and it's all it needs, but everything, everything circles back to Annie John's relationship with her mother. It's competitive, aloof, warm, complex, honest. 

The Imposter Javier Cercas

trans. from the Spanish by Frank Wynne

Vintage

This might be my book of the month (of June). It follows a writer's obsession with a guy named Enric Marco, who claimed to have been a Spanish Civil War Veteran who survived a Nazi concentration camp, who in fact became the president of the association of Spanish camp survivors, but, it was later revealed, had of course never been in a concentration camp at all. Yes, Marco's story is fascinating, his delusions and charade bizarre, but the book is not a simple straight history or reportage. Cercas is present, he is fascinated with the implications of what it means to be an imposter, of writing this book, which begs comparison with In Cold Blood (seriously, Cercas literally begs. Is his book any good? Does it compare? Is his whole life as a writer a fraud?). Running with the manic energy of a manifesto, the book pulls from literature, interviews, and Cercas's imagination. The only thing I've read that is as similarly genre-defiant might be Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and even though The Imposter isn't perfect in places and sometimes gets away from itself, it's a fascinating example of what non/fiction/writing can do.

Mouthful of Birds Samanta Schweblin

trans. from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

Riverhead

Schweblin's short, wild novel Fever Dream is one of the more exciting contemporary books I've read--I taught it as part of my fiction course at UVA. It was the sort of book you can read in a few hours, then lie in bed in the dark for a few hours more, terrified. The short stories in Mouthful don't disappoint, but they aren't the place to start with Schweblin's work, I think. They are stomach-churningly disturbing; the title story is about a little girl who refuses to eat anything except, yup, birds, which as I type it doesn't sound that bad, so maybe it's saying something that Schweblin can push that idea to a point where a reader's skin crawls. I feel like there's been a lot of "fairy tale lite" stuff bubbling up out of the creative-writing industrial swamp these days, but these stories retain some of that medieval macabre, which is enough. Read them or don't, but definitely read Fever Dream.

My Husband Rumena Buzarovska

trans. from the Macedonian by Paul Filev

Dalkey Archive

I love Dalkey, they never mess around. This is a great collection of stories about marriage and the exasperating behavior people engage in when they know each other too long and run out of things to do. The stories are ridiculous, pathetic, charming, often sliding back and forth in tone from paragraph to paragraph, which is a neat trick given the brevity of some of these. A husband is loved, even though he drives his wife nuts; a husband is a bad poet as well as an asshole; a steady, reliable husband might lose his job because his wife had a public spat with her lover; a husband murders his wife, panics, shows the body to his friend, an art dealer, who hails the murdered as a genius and exhibits the corpse. Worth your time. 

Anil's Ghost Michael Ondaatje

The only thing I remember about this book is that I liked it very much. I can't even find it right now. It's in the piles somewhere. But it was great!