The innovative works of legends like Borges and Cortázar not only defined a literary movement, they created an exotic and well-known image of Latin America and its people. A key element of works in the tradition of the magical realism is that the characters react to the fantastical in the same way they do the mundane. However, in his latest collection of short stories, Ni chicha, ni limonada, David Unger’s portrayal of Guatemala is nothing like Garcia Marquez’s provincial yet fantastical Macondo. The characters are instead caught between both belonging to and being alienated from their homeland.

Chicha is a Latin American drink that’s traditionally made from (but not limited to) fermented maize, and limonada is good old lemonade. The phrase “ni chicha ni limonada” is an idiom used to describe something that isn’t one thing or the other—English equivalent. . .

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Contemporary Japanese literature is all too easy to stereotype. As far as the American reading public goes, the only books that come out of Japan seem to be under one of three genres. The first is the “bizarre things happening in an otherwise normal setting” in the mold of Haruki Murakami. As one of the most successful authors to come out of a non-American or Western-European country in the last thirty years, Murakami is surely a success story that publishers want to recreate. The two other kinds of Japanese fiction published in America seem to be horror novels (Koji Suzuki’s The Ring, et al) and hard-boiled, nihilistic crime novels (think Natsuo Kirino and anything yakuza-related.) Of course, this has led to over-saturation on the bookshelves, and I’ve become completely fatigued by novelists that take an ordinary person with an. . .

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I was born in the final decade of communism’s flailing grasp on the Eastern Bloc, and so what I know of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism has long been relegated to what I learned from middle school textbooks, and teachers who had to explain to us why those maps we were so diligently studying were made obsolete overnight. The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain has aided in filling in that gap in my education through its poignant words and images that have left an indelible impression upon me long after I turned the last page. For me, the globe I keep on top of my bookcase from the early 1980s is a quirky relic, but for those whose contributions make up this extraordinary book,. . .

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The short novel is a form in which writers typically exercise great control over their material, accepting the abbreviated length as a kind of challenge, working within that limitation to craft a tight, jewel-like story in which all the elements of the piece—plot, tone, imagery—work together to create a unified artistic effect similar to that of a short story. (Think Heart of Darkness, Death in Venice, The Metamorphosis, or The Old Man and the Sea.) This is decidedly not the case with Rhyming Life & Death, Amos Oz’s latest work of fiction to be published in the U.S. in translation.

There is no doubt that Oz, one of Israel’s most prominent writers, is a master. For four decades he has been producing powerful and moving novels such as Elsewhere, Perhaps (1966; translated 1973) and Fima (1993); he is also the author. . .

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In the most recent translation of Swiss writer Robert Walser’s work, The Tanners, we are reminded once again why Kafka and Musil were fans—his wit. And like everything in Walser’s writing, it is nuanced and subtle. Instead giving us our melodrama straight with no chaser, he blends it with irony, insouciance and imagination so that it doesn’t make us wince when gulp it down; instead, it smoothly sates our desire for a good story and leaves us wanting more. The Tanners, written in 1907, is the semi-autobiographical tale of the five children—four boys and one girl—of the Tanner family: Klaus, Kaspar, Simon, Hedwig, and a son who resides in a mental institution and merits only a mention in the book. Walser focuses the book around Simon, the young, aimless brother who is a bizarre combination of arrogance, self-entitlement, humility,. . .

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Rosa Chacel (1898-1994) sculptor, novelist, poet, essayist, feminist was born and died in Spain, with Brazil as a second home. She was a contemporary with the Generation of ’27, which included Garcia Lorca and Ramon Jaminez, and she was familiar with the writings of Freud and James Joyce and the philosophies of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. She claimed La sinrazón (Dream of Reason) (1960) to be her masterpiece and culmination of her fiction writing. This and much more can be found in Carol Maier’s helpful, thorough introduction. Maier is not only the translator of this Chacel book, which is appearing in English translation for the first time; she is the translator of two other Chacel novels that appear in the University of Nebraska’s European Women Writers Series; she is a scholar of Chacel’s entire writings, and she had the chance to. . .

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As frequently occurs, a few days ago I was browsing through a bookstore when something caught my eye. The book was Negative Horizon by Paul Virilio, which “sets out [his] theory of dromoscopy: a means of apprehending speed and its pivotal—and potentially destructive—role in contemporary global society.” Chapter titles include “The Aesthetics of Disappearance,” “The Metapsychosis of the Passenger,” and “From the Site of the Election to the Site of the Ejection.” I did not purchase the book (the one time I’ve read anything Continuum published it took me over an hour to get through the first ten pages, though kudos to them for putting out a translation of Berlin Alexanderplatz), but something about it struck me as simultaneously so French and so absurdly pretentious that Paul Virilio has stayed with me.

Gérard Gavarry’s Hoppla! 1 2 3, a book I. . .

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For years now, Melville House has been one of the most exciting independent presses out there. The political books they’ve done are fantastic, the Art of the Novella Series is arguably one of the most genius marketing/editorial publishing projects of the past decade, and the return of the Moby Lives blog (I still wear my “The whale is out there, man!” t-shirt every so often) is a brilliant addition to the current litblog scene. And on top of all that there’s the fine list of translations that they’ve been bringing out over the past few years. Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai. Marcel Proust’s The Lemoine Affair. Miguel de Cervantes’s The Dialogue of the Dogs. More recently, the Hans Fallada rediscovery project, which includes Every Man Dies Alone (a Best Translated Book Award nominee), The Drinker, and Little Man, What Now? And. . .

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Anne McLean’s translation of Colombian novelist Evelio Rosero’s The Armies is the winner of this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, given by Great Britain’s Independent newspaper to honor excellence in translated works of fiction published in the UK. (It’s McLean’s second nod from the The Independent in five years: she also won the prize in 2004 for her translation of Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas.)

New Directions has now released The Armies in the U.S. The novel—to my knowledge, the first by Rosero to be translated into English—is a deceptively calm, at times even placid look at a staggeringly violent subject: the perpetual atrocities being committed against human life and dignity by the combatants in the seemingly endless civil war in Colombia. Rosero’s ability to write so plainly about such horrors gives the book an unearthly aspect, as if its. . .

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I’m as guilty as anyone for helping hype Roberto Bolaño’s two big books—“big” both in terms of reputation and size—that FSG released over the past two years. I loved both The Savage Detectives and 2666. I loved the heft, the ambition, the overreaching, and the risks he took.

But amid the Bolaño frenzy of the past couple years, his shorter books were somewhat overlooked. Which is a shame—in many ways, Bolaño is much better with these 150-200 page books than with his sprawling works.

Over the past six years, New Directions has done an amazing job of making all of these available to English readers. They brought out By Night in Chile to great reviews back in 2003. Then Distant Star came out shortly thereafter followed by Last Evenings on Earth, Nazi Literature in the Americas, Amulet, and a collection. . .

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