The Return
by Roberto Bolaño
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This new story collection makes a terrific “point of entry” to Roberto Bolaño’s fiction for readers scared off by his 1,000-page novels, said Michael Singer in the Los Angeles Times. The late Chilean author of 2666 and The Savage Detectives wrote fiction that’s as irresistible as scabrous gossip. The title story, for instance, is narrated by a dead man whose corpse is raped by France’s most famous fashion designer. “You might feel conned by the self-conscious artifice, but you won’t be bored.”
I Curse the River of Time
by Per Petterson
(Graywolf Press, $23)
The newest novel from the Norwegian author of Out Stealing Horses presents “a depressing and uneventful tale,” said Drew Toal in Time Out New York. But Petterson is a master of “conveying the unsaid.” As this book’s antihero confronts divorce, the imminent death of his mother, and the collapse of communism (along with his lifelong faith in it), his sorrow is devastating. He mewls like “a child with a skinned knee,” and we wonder how he’ll ever move on.
Villain
by Shuichi Yoshida
(Pantheon, $26)
The first of Shuichi Yoshida’s crime novels to be translated into English requires close attention, said Margaret Quamme in the Columbus, Ohio, Dispatch. Yoshida is less interested in the mystery of who strangled a young saleswoman than in how this crime affects everyone from casual friends to the chief suspects. The shifting points of view aren’t easy to follow, but they create a convincing portrait of today’s Japan as a place where “loneliness drives people to acts they wouldn’t otherwise consider.”
The Ice Princess
by Camilla Läckberg
(Pegasus, $26)
Here’s proof that not every Swedish thriller is worth reading, said Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times. Camilla Läckberg’s debut was hugely popular in Scandinavia, even though it founders following a promising start. Its “insipid heroine” is a struggling writer who returns to her fast-changing fishing village to discover that a childhood friend has been murdered. The village politics are intriguing, but simplistic characters and a clumsy translation doom this “overblown potboiler.”
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”