FEBRUARY

C. D. Wright, Casting Deep Shade
Copper Canyon, February 2

Before she died unexpectedly in 2016, C. D. Wright completed this vaulting meditation on humanity’s relationship to the beech tree. Imagine a poetic Walden written by an author with less ego to discard and you’ll begin approaching the strangeness and wonder of these poems. Trees, scientists are beginning to learn, can talk to each other at a cellular level. Here’s a book that attempts to listen. Wright was born the daughter of a court stenographer in the Ozarks, so she knows how to turn an ear. She spent years visiting various trees, some of which were special to friends, others that had accumulated folklore. She remembers and addresses trees which were important in her life. Finally, she spoke with arborists. The result is a moving and deeply unique volume. If you haven’t read one of Wright’s books, the first thing you’ll notice is no one writes like her. The oracular stony-faced lyricism that is somehow also warm. Her way of stitching together observation without articles or transitions, as if knowing you’ll be right there with her. Even now—especially now—that the best of her is brought to us on the bookish afterlife of trees. (JF)

Jill Abramson, Merchants of Truth
Simon & Schuster, February 5

Former Executive Editor of The New York Times Jill Abramson paints a nuanced picture of the current state of news media by following four companies—The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and VICE—over the last decade. A useful book in this bizarre moment where the President of the United States has declared (stupid, dangerous) war on the Fourth Estate. (ET)

Chloe Aridjis, Sea Monsters
Catapult, February 5

Guggenheim Fellow Chloe Aridjis’ new novel paints a hallucinatory picture of 1980s Mexico, following a 17-year-old girl named Luisa who boards a bus to the Pacific with a boy she barely knows in an attempt to pursue an unusual obsession: she wants to track down a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs, escapees from a Soviet circus touring Mexico. Luisa settles in a beach community in Oaxaca, where her dreams grow surreal and she begins to disappear into Zipolite, “The Beach of the Dead.” As if all that mystery and longing isn’t enough, the novel pulses to the soundtrack of Joy Divison, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Suffice it to say, I can’t wait to get my hands on it. (Miriam Kumaradoss)

Kelley Armstrong, Watcher in the Woods
Minotaur, February 5

Kelley Armstrong’s latest chiller takes us into a one-horse town located in Yukon, Alaska, where the town’s sole policewoman must investigate a murder while keeping her town full of outlaws and shut-ins safe from the outside world. (MO)

Tony Bellotto, tr. Clifford E. Landers, Bellini and the Sphinx
Akashic, February 5

Bellini and the Sphinx is the American debut for the wildly popular Sao Paulo-based crime series written by Bellotto, the celebrated Brazilian guitarist and writer. His private eye, Remo Bellini, is a conscious homage to Philip Marlowe and the classic noir American detectives, but with an identity all his own and a milieu, the streets of Sao Paulo, that are as alive and mysterious as any you’ll come across in the genre. American readers have waited too long for this, but they’ll finally get the chance to visit Brazil through Bellott/Bellini’s eyes. (DM)

Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, The Spirit of Science Fiction
Penguin Press, February 5

Are you a Bolaño completionist? I am. Somebody please get this for me and call it a Valentine? (JD)

Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics
William Morrow, February 5

It’s the year 2079, and the world is not the same as it used to be. A 102-year-old poet tells the story of her life and the lives of her siblings, starting with “the Pause,” those years their mother was too depressed to emerge from her room, and moving through their childhoods and adult lives. Read: a classic coming-of-age family novel told from the vantage of a climate-changed earth. Possibly not the last of its kind. (ET)

Amy Feltman, Willa and Hesper
Grand Central, February 5

Feltman tracing the paths of two young queer women (the titular Willa and Hesper): the rise and fall of their romance, the respective paths they take to mend their broken hearts (leading them to their ancestral lands of Tbilisi, Georgia, and the war sites of Germany) and their reckoning (or refusal to reckon with) their privilege. I’m always here for portrayals of 21st century queer life, and Willa and Hesper looks to be an excellent addition to the genre. (MK)

Briallen Hopper, Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions
Bloomsbury, February 5

A compelling, smart collection of essays on relationships of many kinds—hoarding, dependence, female friendship, marriage or lack thereof—from a widely published literary scholar. (ET)

Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf
Riverhead, February 5

Marlon James is back, and this time he’s got a trilogy! Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first book in the Dark Star trilogy, brings together African history, mythology, and fantasy, and follows a mercenary named Tracker who’s hired to find a boy who has been missing for three years. Breaking his own rule about working alone, he links up with a hodgepodge band that includes a shape-shifting man-animal named Leopard. James does mystery, dread, and weirdness excellently, and Black Leopard, Red Wolf is likely to raise the bar even higher. It also doesn’t hurt that it has a stunning cover. (MK)

Victor LaValle, and John Joseph Adams eds., A People’s Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers
One World, February 5

A literary collection boasting speculative stories from N. K. Jemisin, Alice Sola Kim, G. Willow Wilson, Charles Yu, Charlie Jane Anders, Leslie Nneka Arimah, Tananarive Due, Maria Dahvana Headley, Catherynne M. Valente, and many more. According to the publisher, the brief was that each story should “challenge oppressive American myths, release us from the chokehold of our history, and give us new futures to believe in. They also asked that the stories be badass.” Assuming all these stories meet those criteria (which I do, because again, look at that lineup), this volume should be a genre-bending knockout. (ET)

Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End
Random House, February 5

Li, who has won every award including the PEN/Hemingway Award and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, is a writer of near-perfect sentences. In this book that’s totally inappropriate for a new parent, a mother and her 16-year-old son who committed suicide exchange letters to one another. An imagined life in a timeless world allows for a new sort of reality, and a unique meditation on loss and love. (EF)

Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway
Ecco, February 5

Talk about anticipated—McCracken hasn’t published a novel in almost 20 years, since 2001’s Niagara Falls All Over Again, which was preceded by her celebrated debut The Giant’s House. Bowlaway opens with a woman named Bertha, who appears to have fallen out of the sky into a cemetery in a small Massachusetts town with a bowling ball in her purse. Eventually, she marries and starts a candlepin bowling alley (claiming she invented the game), a place that, over the years, draws the whole odd town, each member with their own quirks and love stories and tragedies and treasure maps and obscure deaths and estrangements and successes—well, it’s a whole town, like I said. (ET)

Morgan Parker, Magical Negro
Tin House, February 5

Morgan Parker’s poetry is vital, in both senses of the word. Her most recent collection, There Are Things More Beautiful Than Beyoncé, was an absolute knockout—a breathtaking exploration of black womanhood, culture both pop and past, bodies, minds. Poetry’s defenders need not answer those who would sing its dirges, but if they did, Parker’s work could serve as an indisputable response. (JG)

Sylvia Plath, Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom
Harper Perennial, February 5

I once heard a man-poet tell a whole room full of undergrads that Sylvia Plath was overrated. What a dork! I’m still angry about that! Sylvia Plath is fantastic and I am very excited to read this newly discovered story. I don’t even care what it’s about! Oh wait, it’s a dark allegory about female agency? Sign me up times two! (JG)

Tracey Thorn, Another Planet: A Teenager in Suburbia
Canongate, February 7

Until the time came to write this list, I had no idea that Tracey Thorn, the vocalist for Everything But the Girl and collaborator on several Massive Attack songs, is also a writer. As it turns out, Another Planet is her third book. In it, she looks back at her static youth in English suburbia, a place where “nothing seemed to move” but that spawned several artists (including Thorn herself) regardless. Another Planet should appeal not just to fans of Everything But the Girl or Massive Attack, but to anyone who grew up in suburbia, immersing themselves in art and waiting to escape and make their own, less predictable life. (MK)

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias
Graywolf, February 5

Wang’s debut essay collection, which follows her wonderful, pitch black novel The Border of Paradise, is a candid, unsentimental exploration of her life with a bipolar schizoaffective disorder compounded by chronic illness. The essays follow Wang from her diagnosis to the disputes of the medical community to personal experiences and discoveries—like the power of fashion (a good outfit can convince anyone that you’re normal). This collection is sure to shed light on a complex topic foreign to many—and it certainly won’t hurt that she’s a fantastic writer. (ET)

Leila Aboulela, Elsewhere, Home
Grove Press, February 12

Leila Aboulela is one of the world’s best short story writers. Since winning the inaugural Caine Prize, the award which elevated Binyavanga Wainana, NoViolet Bulawayo, and Namwali Serpell (whose debut is finally here), Aboulela has assembled a small body of work of surpassing grace. This selection of her stories from the past twenty years beautifully conjures the vertigo of homesickness. In “Museum,” the Caine Prize winner, a well-to-do Sudanese woman studying overseas and a Scottish man go on an awkward first date to a gallery. “We did Islam in school,” he offers when she tells him what she misses of home. Aboulela excels at capturing the tentativeness of talk like this, the veering way people try to connect in lonely situations. She also understands how isolation can make you strange, fearful. In one tale, a housewife besotted with a trailblazing Muslim writer is roundly rejected when she projects too much on her idol. Yet another story depicts how a man’s relationship with his wife changes when she joins him in London from Sudan. “If you cover your hair in London they’ll think I’m forcing you to do that,” he explains. These are everyday stories observed with unusual sensitivity to the fine grains of hope that live in throwaway gestures. Most of the characters organize their lives around their Muslim faith. Not once do they ask of their characters to perform that faith for us: they just live it. (JF)

Christopher Castellani, Leading Men
Viking, February 12

Castelliani’s fourth novel is catnip for readers who are also writers: in 1953 Italy, Tennessee Williams and his partner Frank Merlo meet 17-year-old actress Anja Bloom at a party thrown by Truman Capote. The three fall in with another couple: Jack, an alcoholic writer, and Sandro, who loves him—which could be enough: just a story about artists and their partners, trying to get along and make it in the middle of the century. But we also get to peek in ten years later, as Frank is dying, and again fifty years after that, when Anja has removed herself from the spotlight, but is hanging on to an unpublished play by Williams that she means to destroy—and that Sandro wants her to produce. (ET)

Geoff Dyer, Broadsword Calling Danny Boy
Pantheon, February 12

Geoff Dyer has spawned a number of genres in which he remains king, partly because no one else dared to write such books. The Novel Which May Not Be A Novel about Jazz Musicians (But, Beautiful); The Book in Which the Biographer Never Writes His Biography (Out of Sheer Rage). Dyer even gate-crashed the photography world and wrote The Book About a Unified Field Theory for How a Picture Works (The Ongoing Moment) and managed to say something new. Just as soon as Dyer masters a genre, however, he’s beetled off to a new one. Lately, he’s been writing The Book in Which the Author Watches a Film. Two years ago the movie at the center of that book was Tarkovsky’s Stalker (Zona), now Dyer has moved on to the Burton and Eastwood triumph, “Where Eagles Dare,” in which a drunk Shakespearean and his gun-twirling western pal team up to make one of the most fabulous men on a mission films of all time. Dyer loved this film as a child, but he doesn’t make the fatal sentimental mistake of worrying over the gap between that affection and what it feels like to see the film today. Instead he just drops right in and begins describing it. Like all of Dyer’s genres, it’s a deceptively difficult stunt to pull off—recreating what it’s like to watch a film in front of you, frame by frame. Dyer is one of the most stylish writers alive, though, and he’s great company. So even if you have no interest in “Where Eagles Dare,” by page two he’s entered some of its scenes, and made the picture move right there before you. As with all moving images, your eye can’t help but turn to it, and for a split second, you’ll forget this illusion was made by words. (JF)

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights
Algonquin, February 12

As a poet, Ross Gay writes gorgeously of the ways pleasure and joy marble pain. He has a sculpture’s eye too, which means he sees amidst the stone of experience shapes which could be—might be—there. His latest book, The Book of Delights, feels like a huge garden of such visions. The collection began as an attempt to write a daily essay on something which delighted him. They aren’t obvious sources of happiness. Random high fives in coffee shops; the sight of two people sharing the load of a shopping bag; pecans. Gay even writes about what happens when he brings a tomato seedling onto a flight. “I don’t know how to check that,” the security guys says, “have a good day.” The pleasure in these essays lies in the contagion of Gay’s way of turning a topic over and over in his hand, like some kind of un-fretful worry bead. Here, each one of these essays says, take a look at this, and you will. (JF)

Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive
Knopf, February 12

Valeria Luiselli is one of the most fascinating and impassioned authors at work today. Her latest tells the story of a family embarking on a road trip from New York City to Arizona (the father to record echoes from the last place where the Chiricahua Apache lived, the mother to try and locate two little girls being held in a detention center on the border). A haunting hybrid of lyrical storytelling and political fury, the book is a powerful indictment of the cruelty and inhumanity inherent in the current American immigration system, and a vital work for the Trump era. (Dan Sheehan)

Shane McCrae, The Gilded Auction Block
FSG, February 12

Early in the current administration there was a feeling voiced in public debate that we’d entered a post-literate space. A time beyond rational critique. Then people slowly realized poets had been predicting this kind of catastrophe. They had in fact been chronicling the America that would made Trump possible all along. Many were not recently clued in to the state of the state either. Nikky Finney, Lawrence Joseph, Natalie Diaz, Yusef Komunyakaa, the great WS Merwin. Claudia Rankine and Terrance Hayes and Robin Coste Lewis. One essential younger voice among this group is Shane McCrae, whose fifth collection is every bit the book our current moment demands and more as it interrogates the notion that this monstrosity has happened to us. “Gilded Auction Block” reaches into America’s past which is present and raises the living specter of white supremacy. Shows how it speaks. How it walks. In whose voice it lives. The fear of blackness it depends upon and spreads. How it has brought so much of the country in collusion with it. Ranging across years and modes, McCrae draws this insanity to the fore and has it speak to us in the voice of familiar names, such as Jefferson Davis or Sylvia Plath, shows how America addresses its nameless, too, its immigrants, the poor. McCrae is far more than history’s keen-eared mimic, though. He is, this book makes abundantly clear, one of poetry’s key archivists of America’s un-dead ghosts. How clearly he shows the state of the house we’ve been living in. (JF)

Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
Knopf, February 12

I enjoyed Morrison’s recent The Origin of Others, a tiny volume based on a series of lectures about race, belonging and the arbitrary divisions between people. I’m going to keep soaking up Morrison’s “I’ve done all I needed to do and the rest is just treats” phase for as long as she’s writing, compiling, editing, thinking — doing all the things she does best, in other words. (AR)

Sandra Newman, The Heavens
Grove Press, February 12

Newman’s latest novel begins in a mostly-familiar New York City, where Ben and Kate meet and fall in love. Simple enough, except that Kate has these dreams, mysterious, real-seeming dreams of Elizabethan England, and as the novel goes on, the “real” world begins to change overnight. Is Kate changing everything while she sleeps? I wolfed down this novel, which is smart and terrifying and delicious literary storytelling. (ET)

Sharma Shields, The Cassandra
Henry Holt, February 12

Part of the recent boom of reimagined myths (see: The Mere Wife, Circe and Everything Under, among others), Sharma Shields’ novel The Cassandra reworks the Greek myth of Cassandra into the life of Mildred Groves, who (like her mythological counterpoint) is gifted and cursed with the ability to see the future. She runs away to work at the Hanford Research Center during WWII, and while she’s delighted at first to no longer feel like an outsider, her visions of what is to come grow increasingly nightmarish and force her towards a moral reckoning. Grappling with themes of violence and the patriarchy, The Cassandra looks to be both an intriguing reimagining of Greek and a novel that’s relevant to the times we live in. (MK)

Yūko Tsushima, tr. Geraldine Harcourt, Territory of Light
FSG, February 12

Originally published in 1979 in monthly installments, Territory of Light follows a young woman, recently divorced, who moves into a new apartment in Tokyo with her young daughter. The episodic chapters are intimate, claustrophobic reminders of how much can change in a year. The mother-child relationship is both beautiful and painful, calling to mind Days of Abandonment (but less Italian) or Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation. (EF)

Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy
Random House, February 12

Wilkinson’s debut is a spy novel with deep explorations of political, racial, and sexual norms, or it’s a deeply intellectual novel disguised as a spy novel. In either case, Marie Mitchell, an African-American FBI agent who is recruited to undermine a foreign regime, is an unforgettable character, and the entire novel is an absolute page-turner. (EF)

John Williams, Nothing But the Night
NYRB, February 12

John Williams’s Stoner is the only book I can think of that is famous for being not famous enough (according to some, anyway), and it has its devotees as well as its detractors. So I’m very curious about this reissue of Williams’s first novel, which NYRB describes as “a brooding psychological noir” about a young man hiding out from his life at the bottom of a bottle, and what happens when his estranged father comes to town. (ET)

Han Kang, The White Book
Hogarth, February 15

I adored Han Kang’s eerie English-language debut of denial, excess, and transformation, The Vegetarian, and I can’t wait to read her next tale, which promises to be equal parts Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, and something entirely Han Kang’s own. In The White Book, a writer in residency based in Warsaw contemplates the color white as a symbol for grief, for a quieter, yet just as intensely symbolic, follow-up to the startling violence of her first two books. (MO)

Diane di Prima, Spring and Autumn Annals and Revolutionary Letters
City Lights, February 19

This year, Diane di Prima will turn 85 and her volume in the immortal City Lights Pocket Poet series, Revolutionary Letters, is as relevant as ever. di Prima’s crotchety, yearning and oratory poetic voice is the sound of a mind ablaze with revolt. If someone were smart, they’d turn it into leaflets. It’d at least make people think. di Prima wasn’t always such an icon, though, and the reissues from City Lights bring us back to the period of her becoming. From the moment she dropped out of Swarthmore and moved to New York, di Prima had a knack for living her way into the red hot margin of things. In the 1950s she spent time with the Beats, which later turned into the subject of her book, Memoirs of a Beatnik. In the 1960s she was active in New York theatre and also edited The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka, before moving to Stinson Beach and becoming a full-time spoke of the wheel of Bay Area poetic light. Autumn Annals sees all of this period through the wavy lens of grief. The book is a series of diaries di Prima wrote in tribute and mourning for her friend and Warhol Factory Member, Freddie Herko, who jumped to his death at age 29 in 1964. di Prima is writing to console herself, and her anguish and shock bleed over into how she sees the world. The urgency with which she must make decisions. To read these diaries now alongside di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters—begun in 1968 in a spirit of utopian hope and ecological terror—is to enter the intimate moral consciousness of a writer who acted where many simply just thought. “These are transitional years and the dues/will be heavy,” she writes in “Revolutionary Letter 10.” “The continent is a seed.” All this before Monsanto existed. By letter 102, her tone has changed, her technology updated: “Soon the only ones/who’ll know how to find us/will be Google/& those small surveillance drones.” (JF)

Janet Malcolm, Nobody’s Looking at You: Essays
FSG, February 19

Malcolm is a brilliant critic, and her collected essays bring together some of her best narrative nonfiction pieces. Included here is everything from profiles of fashion designer Eileen Fisher and cable news host Rachel Maddow to an essay about email etiquette that, though written more than a decade ago, is still somehow relevant. (EF)

Lindsay Stern, The Study of Animal Languages
Viking, February 19

Don’t you love reading about a couple at the moment when their lives start to fall apart? Ivan and Prue are linguistics experts, but they’re having a hard time communicating with each other. Throw in a handsome colleague and a burdensome father-in-law named Frank, and you’ve got that unhappy family that’s unhappy in its own way. Lindsay Stern’s debut novel is an intimate look at love, language, and their limits. (Katie Yee)

Ayelet Tsabari, The Art of Leaving
Random House, February 19

There are few things like a moving memoir of dislocation and relocation, and Ayelet Tsabari’s story of life after the death of her father promises to deliver. What does an Israeli girl with Yemeni origins feel when the country of her birth is hostile to the traditions of her ancestors? One answer is that she moves. What did Tsabari find in New York, Canada, Thailand and India? What drove her from one place and drew her to another? Where, the book seems to ask, does home end up being? (AR)

Mark Doten, Trump Sky Alpha
Graywolf, February 19

Mark Doten’s second novel is a contemporary dystopia (or just “contemporary,” I guess) about nuclear apocalypse, Trump, and Twitter (truly a Mad Libs of nightmares!). Obviously I’m concerned that it will already feel too prescient on its release, but as a social media editor, I’m always interested in reading about nightmarish internet wormholes. (JG)

Mark Mayer, Aerialists
Bloomsbury Publishing, February 19

Through the nine stories in Aerialists, Mark Mayer recasts classic carnival characters as misfits seeking grandeur in a lonely world. Ranging from a friendless peach farmer conducting a funeral for an elephant, to a realtor for the super-rich invoking his inner murder clown, to a model-train hobbyist preparing to throw his miniature world in the trash, Aerialists is a collection of myths that have bled into the everyday. The collection looks like an intriguing circus of the beautiful, the freakish, and the poignant, among several other kinds of “American exaggerations.” (MK)

Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Bangkok Wakes to Rain
Riverhead, February 19

Sprawling over decades, Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s Bangkok Wakes to Rain weaves the stories of several different characters—from a musician playing for an audience of ghosts, to a student bleeding to death in the street after being stabbed by a lover, to a plastic surgeon designing a new face for a girl—into a portrait of an amphibious, ever-morphing Bangkok. There’s an excerpt from the novel on the Penguin Random House website, and if its lyricism and vividness are anything to go by, Bangkok Wakes to Rain already looks set to be one of 2019’s essential reads. (MK)

David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth
Tim Duggan Books, February 19

Remember that 7,500 word New York Magazine essay “The Uninhabitable Earth” that detailed the potential impacts of climate change if no action is taken to reduce greenhouse gas emission? That cheery piece full of worst case scenarios has been expanded to become Wallace-Wells first book, due out in April. (EF)

Jen Beagin, Vacuum in the Dark
Scribner, February 26

This is the story of 26-year-old Mona, a woman running from her troubled past, cleaning houses for a living in New Mexico. She gets a close look at the private lives of her clients, and their paths cross in messy, unexpected ways. Mona is a distinct character to follow, and it’s fascinating to see the world filtered through her. (Example: her nickname for God is Bob.) It’s funny and kind of gross (the first chapter is called “Poop”). Enjoy. (KY)

Christos Ikonomou, tr. Karen Emmerich, Good Will Come From the Sea
Archipelago, February 26

Four linked stories about those struggling with the Greek economic crisis, and its effects on their lives, on an unnamed island. It’s not a cheery book—class conflict, unhappiness, and powerlessness abound—but it is an essential one. (ET)

Don Winslow, The Border
William Morrow, February 26

Winslow’s latest is one of the most hotly anticipated titles in recent years, the final in the three-volume Cartel series, which began in 2005 with The Power of the Dog, continued with The Cartel in 2015, and now concludes with The Border. Together, Winslow’s novels make up an epic crime fiction history of the modern War on Drugs, an achievement that rivals Ellroy’s history of the Los Angeles underworld and goes as far as any work of fiction can in explaining how we’ve reached the current quagmire: a region engulfed in violence, the spread of an opioid epidemic, the militarization of police forces across the Americas, and the rise of opportunistic political regimes eager to capitalize on the suffering. All that, and Winslow tells a hell of a compelling story. (DM)

César Aira, tr. Chris Andrews, Birthday
New Directions, February 28

Argentine author César Aira’s reputation precedes him. He has more than 100 books and stories under his belt, and Birthday adds to this oeuvre with a brief, humorous meditation about the author’s 50th birthday (he’ll be turning 70 when the book is published) and the way time and people pass us by. (AR)

Rachel Ingalls, Binstead’s Safari
New Directions, February 28

If you haven’t already read Rachel Ingalls’ slim 1982 masterpiece, Mrs. Caliban (the story of a grieving suburban housewife who enters into a passionate affair with a soulful humanoid sea monster, reissued last year by New Directions), you’re missing out on one of the most eerily brilliant novels of the last fifty years. Happily, New Directions has gone back to the Ingalls well and is reissuing Binstead’s Safari—another sinister, feminist, magical realist gem about an underappreciated woman escaping the orbit of a shitty man. The quiet, subservient Millie Binstead accompanies her awful academic husband, Stan, on a research trip to Africa, but en route is transformed into a fierce, vivacious version of herself that Stan can no longer control. (DS)

Claudio Magris, tr. Anne Milano Appel, Snapshots
Yale, February 28

A flaneur and cosmopolitan in an era which often assumes these designations are dead, Claudio Magris has spent his life rethreading the line of European History through the present. So vitally it sometimes seems he has lived an extra lifetime. His masterpieces, the drowned novel Danubio and the linked collection Microcosms, opened the doorway to several of today’s best novelists, from Olga Tokarczuk and Aleksandar Hemon, from Jenny Erpenbeck to Rabih Alameddine. For the past fifteen years, as Magris has continued to produce his own peculiar brand of nonfiction novel, he has sketched visions from his cafe chair, at his apartment, from temples in India and inside mosques in Istanbul. “Snapshots” collects them and they read like the satori of a historian, walking out the wintry days of his life. He visits gravestones, conducts annual conversation with friends, perhaps for the last time. Falls in love with Trieste all over again. If Magris was a filter on instagram its hallmark would be an earned melancholy. Thank god he is not, though, for on every page here is a way of looking that restores mystery to the world. (JF)