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Shklovsky: Witness to an Era is a blend of riotous anecdote, personal history, and literary reflection, collecting interviews with Viktor Shklovsky conducted by scholar Serena Vitale in the '70s, toward the end of the great critic's life, and in the face of interference and even veiled threats of violence from the Soviet government. Shklovsky's answers are wonderfully intimate, focusing particularly on the years of the early Soviet avant-garde, and his relationships with such figures as Eisenstein and Mayakovsky. Bearing witness to a vanished age whose promise ended in despair, Shklovsky is in great form throughout, summing up a century of triumphs and disappointments, personal and historical.

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Emil, the unwanted child of two young parents, is adopted by Yoel and Leah, a childless couple. Yet, as the years pass, it becomes clear that Emil doesn't bear much resemblance to the parents who've loved and raised him. Is his name the only thing his real parents have left him? Kin traces the movements of Emil and his four parents as they walk through the same city, nearby but apart, searching for each other in the faces of passersby; until Yoel, now old, becomes determined to do the impossible: return his grown son—a lonely man approaching middle age—to his birth parents. In prose that is both minimal and subtly off kilter, acclaimed Israeli novelist Dror Burstein introduces us to an Israel that is as peculiar, and poignant, as Donald Barthelme's America: ranging from an apocalyptic future to the petty annoyances of daily life, from shifting continents to tiny heartbreaks.

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Mathilde Lewly—a female painter at the dawn of the twentieth century—has achieved notoriety among the Parisian avant-garde. She and her husband, also a talented young artist, pursue their separate visions side by side in a Clichy atelier, galvanized by the artistic ferment that surrounds them. But the couple are threatened by the shadow of Mathilde's little sister, Eugénie: since the two girls' sudden departure from their native England, Eugénie has been determined to vault the eight years separating her from Mathilde. Now, devoured by envy and haunted by a past she never actually experienced, the «little one» hurls herself into the artistic and personal life of her elder sister. It is the birth of a fierce rivalry, an emotional tug-of-war, played out against the bohemian riot of the last century's wildest years. But will the First World War's sudden and brutal eruption allow Mathilde to escape this intimate conflict and achieve her destiny?

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Taking Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Gerard Manley Hopkins as its primary subjects, Surface Tension reveals how these later Victorian poets repeatedly imagine the aesthetic moment—charged, variegated, intensely focused—as capable of birthing a new, and newly redemptive, culture. Turning to contemporary experimental poets and theorists of poetry, such as Andrew Joron, Lisa Robertson, Christopher Nealon, and Joan Retallack, it goes on to reveal how our own poetry's fascination with complex surfaces and imagined social transformation has deep and under-recognized ties to Victorian concepts. Surface Tension offers new insights into the debt we owe to the most radical of the Victorians while yielding new understandings of how late Victorian poetry, even when least explicitly political, engages, and often re-envisions, the period's pressing anxieties about social progress, decadence, and revolution.

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Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century French literature, produced a wide variety of essays and fictions that reflect on the complexities of literary work. His description of writing continually returns to a number of themes, such as solitude, passivity, indifference, anonymity, and absence—forces confronting the writer, but also the reader, the text itself, and the relations between the three. For Blanchot, literature involves a movement toward disappearance, where one risks the loss of self; but such a sacrifice, says Blanchot, is inherent in the act of writing. Approaching Disappearance explores the question of disappearance in Blanchot's critical work and then turns to five narratives that offer a unique reflection on the threat of disappearance and the demands of literature—work by Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Louis-René Des Forêts, and Nathalie Sarraute.

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A collision between contemporary poetics and the Renaissance lyric, between aestheticism and political engagement, The Master of Insomnia is a collection of Slovenian poet Boris A. Novak's verse from the last fifteen years, including numerous poems never before available in English. In these sensitive translations, Novak stands revealed as both innovator and observer; as critic Aleš Debeljak has written: «The poet's power in bearing witness to Sarajevo and Dalmatia, to his childhood room and his retired father, to the indifferent passage of time and the desperate pain of loss, confirms the melancholy clairvoyance of Walter Benjamin, who stated that what is essential hides in the marginal, negligent, and hardly observed details. Whoever strives to see the „big picture“ will inevitably overlook the essential . . . [Novak's] wide-open eyes must watch over both the beauty of this life and the horror of its destruction.»

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A woman falls into a coma. Perhaps she's going to die. Becoming the sleeper's shadow, the woman's daughter will accompany her mother through six weeks of agony, bearing witness to the prolonged death imposed upon her by the monstrous machine of modern medicine. During this final voyage through the fog, the narrator attempts to recover the vivacious woman she knew before this illness: the mad lover, the romantic spouse, the musician who sacrificed her dreams to the reality of life with her husband. By assembling her memories of the dying woman, gluing together scraps of recollections like puzzle pieces, Marie Chaix reconstructs the portrait of a woman who she deeply loved—a blurred silhouette forever fixed in that «museum of dust» where each life ends.

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Arguably Gordon Lish's masterpiece, Peru begins with its narrator announcing, «There is nothing which I will not tell you if I can think of it.» Gradually, the story of a dark childhood secret—real or imagined—unfolds: in 1940, six-year-old Gordon murdered his harelipped rival, Steven Adinoff, in a Long Island sandbox . . . (unless he didn't). Peru's narrator weaves together strands of disconnected, mesmerizing trivia, resurrecting memories of the mundane suburban childhood that spawned a killing: the sense of tedium on an endless summer day; the squishy sounds of a hoe digging into flesh. Ambiguous, complex, inventive, and subversively comic, Peru is a compendium of unnerving observations about memory, violence, obsession, and the potential horror behind the facade of an ordinary life.

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A madman recalls his first erotic encounter, a priest loses sleep over a heretic, a scholar searches for the anomaly that inspired the Hindu divinities, a spinster hallucinates her own seductions, a pope suckles a wet nurse. Erotic and fiercely funny, these stories range across many centuries and cultures, from Algeria to Egypt to Italy to France, and all demonstrate time and again why Rikki Ducornet has been called «one of the most interesting American writers around» (Nation).

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Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award A journalist by trade, who now suffers from an immune deficiency developed while researching this book, presents personal accounts of what happened to the people of Belarus after the nuclear reactor accident in 1986, and the fear, anger, and uncertainty that they still live with. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich «for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.»

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