McNally Robinson NYC

by Elena Ferrante
(Consortium, $14.95)
This Italian author uses a pseudonym and writes like Anna Magnani on acid. Turning the mystique of maternal instinct on its head, ’she’ tells the eerie story of a mother on holiday whose observation of a young family becomes criminal and covetous. Shocking and unforgettable..

by Gil Adamson
(HarperCollins, $25.95)
Unearthly silences, living spectres, profound expanses and a primitive solitude billow through this story of a young widow on the run. A turn-of-the-century North American landscape wafts and thunders past as Adamson’s prose heaves and sighs trickling out answers to gnawing questions just as we feel the tingle of new ones on our skin. As a work it feels a living thing embodying the elegance, urgency and uncivilized beauty of a wild creature..

by Emile Habiby
(Ibis Editions, $16.95)
This is the epitomy of a late work. Confusing, tangential and so comfortable in its own language that you’ll find yourself slipping into the author’s own descriptive cadence. He gives us here a Haifa, a history, occluded by fable and fog and vines and darkness and dusty sun and, of course, by memory itself..

by Benjamin Black
(Holtzbrink, $25.00)
This sequel to Christine Falls is as atmospheric and dark, dark, dark a story as its predecessor. Benjamin Black is actually John Banville, author of The Sea, a writer’s writer who is tackling the mystery genre. This book pulls you in with complicated characters, all machinating in gloomy 1950’s Dublin, and manages to be a crackling story as well as a bitter study of chances lost, and contentment squandered..

by Kevin Brockmeier
(Random House, $21.95)
The best part of Brockmeier’s sleeper hit novel Brief History of the Dead was the stand-alone first chapter about the city of the dead. This latest short story collection has a whole host of those concentrated, moving, fable-like tales: a man who accidentally picks up God’s overcoat and finds himself besieged by inscrutable prayers; a woman whose life is changed by her photo in National Geographic; a mute man who tends parakeets in order to contribute song to the world. Not every one works, but when they do it’s like the moment of clarity in a dream..

by Aravind Adiga
(Simon and Schuster, $24.00)
A vivid, fast-paced look at class and caste in India, rollickingly related by a murderer you can’t help but root for. Delhi comes alive in his descriptions of it as a corrupt, depraved and fascinating city. As a card-carrying member of the oppressive upper classes, I got both thrills and chills, and predict that they’ll HATE this book back home..

by Adam Mansbach
(Spiegel & Grau, $23.95)
This book made me antisocial keeping me breathless at home in my pajamas for days. I don’t know if it was the energy of a Jewish kid from the Bronx in the 1930s; the master-class descriptions of hip hop, photography and Harlem jazz; the drama and suspense of 1990s Eastern Europe; the compassionate depiction of an overshadowed female artist as well as her Great Man husband; or the best party scene I’ve ever read (start on page 19). Adam Mansbach is a whirlwind, epic talent, not perfect, but full of a cross-pollinated American energy that is well-nigh irresistible..

by Mischa Berlinski
(Holtzbrink, $14.00)
In which a hipster-ish young American goes to Thailand and gets sucked into the worlds of anthropologists and missionaries with the most remote villages and obscure tribes as backdrop. There’s a murder mystery, many entertaining anthropological digressions, even more entertaining insights into the minds of white missionaries among the heathens, and, beneath it all, some really good writing that makes you think even as you’re laughing..

by Michael Chabon
(HarperCollins, $12.95)
Rejoice, fellow Sherlock Holmes aficionados–he’s back. This tightly-written novella is a complete pleasure for the writing and story alone–who wouldn’t love a tale of a loquacious parrot, a bloody murder and a mysterious, little Holocaust survivor? As an added bonus, it involves the Great Man himself, grown old and decrepit but still up to his brilliant deductive tricks..

by Toby Barlow
(HarperCollins, $22.95)
I know you’re thinking, “What? Another epic, free-verse poem about rival gangs of werewolves in contemporary Los Angeles?” but this book really bucks the cliches of the genre. Seriously though, it’s on one hand like nothing I’ve ever read, and on the other hand like all of my favorite literary adventure stories: suspenseful, compelling, rich with metaphor, full of larger-than-life characters and great scenes…and (dare I say it about a gang that never leaves a body behind?) deliciously meaty..