Recently Mentioned Books

A few I didn’t get to read yet, but have hopes for are Alan Moore’s Jerusalem , and Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk , caveat emptor in both cases, plus Invisible Planets , edited by Ken Liu, a collection of Chinese science fiction.

Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review Guide to Literary Fiction .  An amazingly comprehensive and informative work, mostly about literature in translation, from the creator of the Literary Saloon blog about fiction.  I liked it so much I decided to do a Conversation with Michael Orthofer .  If you could own only ten works on literature, this should be one of them.

Jean-Michael Rabaté, Think Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human .  This work of criticism is grounded in literary theory, but informative and smart nonetheless.

Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia .  A revealing mismash look into the mind of the author, giving you an integrated picture of her world view, with carefully calculated feints thrown in.  I should note this one works only if you know and love her novels already.  Ferrante’s “children’s” story The Beach at Night is also worthwhile, very dark, you can read it in a small number of minutes.  Here is a good NYT review .

Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia .  A revealing mismash look into the mind of the author, giving you an integrated picture of her world view, with carefully calculated feints thrown in.  I should note this one works only if you know and love her novels already.  Ferrante’s “children’s” story The Beach at Night is also worthwhile, very dark, you can read it in a small number of minutes.  Here is a good NYT review .

The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. LeGuin , self-recommending.

Emily Dickinson’s Poems as She Preserved Them , edited by Cristanne Miller.  The visual presentation of poetry matters too, plus she is one of the very best.

Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai .  Review here .  Strictly speaking, this is a reissue of an earlier published but neglected work.  Maniacal, intense, super-smart, about a mother bringing up a prodigy.

The Complete Works of Primo Levi , in three volumes, edited by Ann Goldstein.  By no means is all of this fiction, but I will put these books in this category.  A revelation, as Levi has more works of interest, and a broader range of intellect and understanding, than I had realized.  There is plenty of linguistics, economics, history, and social science in these literary pages as well as consistently beautiful writing and superb translations.  This is technically from 2015, but I missed it last ...

Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Reputations , a short Colombian novel on memory — personal, historical, sexual, and otherwise, this was my favorite short work of the year.

Javier Marias, Thus Bad Begins .  I have only started this, but so far I like it very much.  I have enough faith in Marias to put in on the list.

Claire Louise-Bennett, Pond , more from Ireland, short, nominally fiction but more like a circular sensory experience of reading overlapping short stories, with a cumulative effect akin to that of poetry.  I found this one mesmerizing.

Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians .  A novel of an affair, with intoxicating Irish prose and a genuine energy on the page, though it is more a work of intensifying fervor than a traditional plot-based story.

The author is Richard Baldwin and the subtitle is Information Technology and the New Globalization .  The new globalization is the vertical geographic spread of the supply chain, as enabled by information technology.  Think iPhone, the components of which are made in a number of different countries.  (By the way, here is a very good Adam Minter piece on why an American-made iPhone would be very difficult to pull off.)  The important form of trade today is data flows, which enable the export of “...

You can order the book here .

That is from Nathalie Ginzburg , from her book The Little Virtues .  Here is a copy of the essay (pdf).  Discovering Ginzburg over the last few weeks has been a revelation for me; she is surely one of the more underrated writers.  Here is Bookslut on Ginzburg .

Here you can order Fuchsia’s new and excellent book The Land of Fish and Rice .

2. Dan Ariely has a new book coming out, Payoff .

Here is the full review .  And just one point: I know many of you claim I have not predicted much of current goings-on.  It is true I did not expect Trump to win, but you will find many other predictions in this book, most of which are looking pretty good as of today.  Typically if I am writing material into a book I do not blog it, so that the material will be fresh to all of my readers.  If you order The Complacent Class , you will find very little of it already has shown up on MR , the chapte...

5. Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone [Dream of the Red Chamber], Penguin edition, vol.I.  I am not confident of my ability to follow along all of the longer plot lines, but it is more absorbing and readable than I had recalled from a much earlier attempt to read it.  And overall it does make upper middle class life in 18th century China seem more civilized than its counterpart in Europe.

4. Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia .  A revealing look into the mind of the author, but this one works only if you know and love her novels already.  Ferrante’s “children’s” story The Beach at Night is worthwhile, very dark, you can read it in a small number of minutes.  Here is a good NYT review .

4. Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia .  A revealing look into the mind of the author, but this one works only if you know and love her novels already.  Ferrante’s “children’s” story The Beach at Night is worthwhile, very dark, you can read it in a small number of minutes.  Here is a good NYT review .

3. Esther Schor, Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language .  I hadn’t known that almost all Esperanto words are accented on the penultimate syllable (bad for poetry), the system of correlatives and “table words” can be quite difficult (“It also has nine groups of word endings, not only for place but also for time, quantity, manner, possession, entity, etc.”), and how much the entire movement was influenced by the intellectual climate of late 19th century Russian Jewish th...

2. Jeffrey Edward Green, The Shadow of Unfairness: A Plebeian Theory of Liberal Democracy .  “There will always be some plutocracy, don’t get bent out of shape too badly” is my brief summary of this one.  This book could be more readable, but it is highly intelligent.

1. Ronald C. White, American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant .  Grant is still underrated, this book is highly readable and to the point and not to fusty.  Someone should get Paul Krugman (a Grant fan) to review this book.