Category: book acquired

Frederic Pokosch’s Voices (Book acquired, late Feb. 2026)

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Frederic Prokosch’s 1982 memoir Voices is getting a reprint from NYRB. Their blurb:

Frederic Prokosch was a fantasist. His first novel, The Asiatics, was a stylish account of a man hitchhiking across an Asia that was more dream than reality. Praised by T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, and W. B. Yeats, it was a tremendous success, never to be replicated in Prokosch’s long career. In the 1940s, he moved to Europe, away from what he called the “middle-class and fancy dullness” of midcentury American letters, writing novels of a highly romantic kind, playing squash and tennis, collecting butterflies, and printing deluxe limited editions of poems he admired.

In 1982, Prokosch returned to the literary limelight with Voices—a self-proclaimed memoir framed by his childhood in Middle America and his old age in the South of France, made of short chapters about his encounters with famous figures, whose every word he seems to recall. Voices, too, is a work of fantasy. But if Prokosch’s portraits are not strictly true to life, they come alive as few portraits do. Whether he is playing tennis with Ezra Pound or retrieving Marc Chagall’s wallet from the Grand Canal, sharing a beer with Bertolt Brecht or a steam bath with W.H. Auden, Prokosch hypnotizes the reader with his ability to capture these artists’ cadences and characters, creating a masterpiece of imaginative memoir.

Death/Blast/Bonus (Books acquired, late Feb. 2026)

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I got a copy of the last (maybe latest?) of David Ohle’s Moldenke novels, The Death of a Character, in today’s mail. I’ve read or reread Ohle’s Moldenke’s novels over the past few weeks, and I think they are some of the best, grossest, funniest diagnoses of the emerging 21st-century apocalypse I’ve ever encountered. I’m a bit sad that The Death of a Character might be the last one, but there’s always rereading. I got a copy of Ohle’s 2014 short novel The Blast, which I think is a Moldenke novel without Moldenke. (Ohle’s 2008 novel The Pisstown Chaos is basically a Moldenke novel without Moldenke.)

I also got a copy of a 1981 anthology called A Reader of New American Fiction which features a piece by David Ohle I’d never heard of before, called “Easy Neutronics.” I got the book via interlibrary loan, requesting it as part of an in-class demo I was doing during a class. It arrived bearing the stamp of Brevard Community College (née Brevard Junior College), which is now Eastern Florida State College. Thank you to the librarian in Titusville.

The book appears to have never been read.

 

Antoine Volodine’s The Monroe Girls (Book acquired, 13 Feb. 2026)

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There is an old saying, some may say a cliche, but nevertheless it rings as wisdom in my waxy ears: The best time to read a Volodine was twenty years ago. The second best time is now. Maybe start with Volodine’s 2021 novel The Monroe Girls, forthcoming in translation by Alyson Waters from Archipelago. Their jacket copy:

Breton has seen brighter days. Now his body sags as he pulls a pair of binoculars to his withered face. He peers from the grimy window of a near-empty psychiatric compound—one of the last buildings standing after an unspecified disaster—spying rue Dellwo below, dreary in perpetual rain. Into this world of devastation drop the Monroe girls—paramilitaries trained in the “dark place” by Monroe, a dissident executed long ago. Their mission to revamp the Party is futile in this bleak, decaying world. Breton, our schizophrenic narrator, is tasked (and tortured) by what remains of the Party to locate and identify the Monroe girls using special optical equipment and his powers of extrasensory perception. Breton’s journey through a bardo-like, hostile labyrinth invites us into a sensual swirl of bodily decay, political acquiescence, and civilizational collapse. In this derelict setting, Volodine ruminates on identity, surveillance, life after death, and love (which, alas, does not conquer all). An urgent and blistering tale, beautifully rendered with Volodine’s distinct pathos and humor.

Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (Book acquired, 12 Feb. 2026)

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I reread Robert Coover’s 1968 sophomore novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. in January in anticipation of its reprint in the next few weeks from NYRB. I had remembered the novel’s dark humor and bright inventions, but had forgotten how sad it is, particularly its conclusion. I have a full review planned. In the meantime, here’s part of NYRB’s publicity copy for the novel–

Somewhere in a “major-league” American city, there lives a man named J. Henry Waugh—no-account accountant, barfly, and country music fan. The most important part of Waugh’s life, as far as he is concerned, is lived in his head, where he is sole proprietor of the Universal Baseball Association, which is now entering its fifty-sixth season. The games are played with dice and scorecards, and the players are just numbers and names, but for Waugh they’re more real than the dreary office, the dive bar, and the dingy apartment in which he spends his days.

–while the NYRB blurb doesn’t give a full “spoiler,” it does characterize a pivotal event in the novel a bit too directly. Although I don’t really think so-called spoilers can affect strong works of literature (and I think that The Universal Baseball Association is a strong work of literature), I do think that its early climactic action is best enjoyed cold. For this reason, I’d avoid reading the back of this edition, along with Ben Marcus’s introduction, until after you’ve finished it. More thoughts to come.

Blog about George Saunders’ novel Vigil, a novel I have not yet read (Book acquired 11 Feb. 2026)

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I’ve been reading a lot of David Ohle lately — the Moldenke cycle, specifically. I read The Pisstown Chaos (2008) late last year, then kept going with The Old Reactor (2013), and then reread The Age of Sinatra (2004). I’m near the end of a  reread of Ohle’s seminal weirdo novel Motorman (1972) right now, and I’ve got The Blast (2014) and The Death of a Character (2021) on the way.

The Moldenke books take place in an abject, stinky, ruinous post-apocalyptic landscape populated with jellyheads, neutrodynes, imps, Stinkers, and Americans. The world runs on broken logic and bureaucratic absurdity. Order is repeatedly disrupted by Chaoses and Forgettings. Bodies fail; technology fails. Ohle relates these stories in a genteel, dry tone (especially in the later books) that mocks any hint of a Hero Saving the Day. His novels, especially those published during US America’s foolish GWOT misadventures, capture the spirit of my country’s farcical post-twentieth-century trajectory.

But this blog post is ostensibly about George Saunders, or rather George Saunders’ new novel Vigil, which I have not yet read, having only just today received a review copy in the mail.

I do not think that a writer has a cultural duty to respond to now, or Now, or even “Now!” if you like–but I do think that Saunders has always aimed to respond to the US American zeitgeist in his fictions. And in the best of his fictions — including the stories “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “Pastoralia,” “Sea Oak,” and “The Semplica Girl Diaries” — Saunders skewered US American absurdity with a tender pathos that balanced his dark humor without overpowering its core anger. But Saunders’ later fiction is perhaps over-seasoned with love, empathy, all that hippy-dippy shit. It’s not necessary to look through everyone’s eyes. Empathy has its limits. Latter-day Saunders often read to me as, in its worst moments, sanctimonious.

NYT critic Dwight Garner didn’t use the word “sanctimonious” to describe Saunders in his negative review of  Vigil, but his lede comes close:

“Once you start illustrating virtue, you had better stop writing fiction,” Robert Penn Warren wrote. It was once difficult to imagine this dictum might apply to George Saunders.

From the start, in the mid-1990s, he’s been an American original, a briskly whiskered national asset. He’s an ineluctably strange, dark and funny writer whose work has some of Mark Twain’s subversive wit, Kurt Vonnegut’s cosmic playfulness and Donald Barthelme’s laboratory blitzing of high and low culture.

It was my colleague who alerted me to this review, which I skimmed, noting the phrase “Downhill Alert!”, before dispensing with it. (My colleague wants me to read the book in some kind of, uh, I don’t know, tandem?, with him.)

This colleague loved Saunders’ 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo. I did not love Lincoln in the Bardo. I couldn’t even finish it. I found it maudlin, trite. It was like watching your dad try and impress your boss (I don’t know what that means). I wrote that year, 2017, that—

Lincoln in the Bardo might be a really good novel and I just can’t see it or hear it or feel it. I see postmodernism-as-genre, as form; I read bloodless overcooked posturing; I feel schmaltz. I failed the novel, I’m sure. I mean, I’m sure it’s good, right? The problem is me, as usual.

By 2018 I had changed my mind on that last sentence. I read Saunders’ New Yorker published short story “Little St. Don” and thought it was a massive, massive failure to respond to the incipient fascist encroachment of the first Trump administration. I concluded that,

Saunders loves his reader too much. The story wants to make us feel comfortable now, comfortable, at minimum, in our own moral agency and our own moral righteousness. But comfort now will not do.

I thought Saunders’ next two New Yorker stories were a smidge stronger, calling “Elliott Spencer,” “a stylistically-bold tale about poor people who are reprogrammed and then deployed as paid political protesters.” Of “Love Letter,” I suggested that the exercise “reads like a thought experiment with no real conclusion, no solid answer. Or, rather, the solution is there in the title: love. But is that enough?”

Vigil is about a dying oil tycoon visited by a comforting angel, or series of angels, or something like that. It is, if I understand correctly, Saunders’ take on “climate fiction,” which I imagine will not really dwell in the nasty gross irreal reality of the fall we are falling into right now. But I could be wrong. I can’t help but notice that Vigil seems to be organized, like Lincoln in the Bardo, around a “Great Man” in USAian history — a mover and shaker, a powerbroker, a markmaker, etc. I’ll try to read it with an open mind, but I have to admit that even the prospect pales against my recent dip into Ohle’s sour, funky flavors. But we shall see.

 

John A. Williams’ !Click Song (Book acquired 28 Jan. 2026)

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I picked up a copy of John A. Williams’ 1982 novel !Click Song after reading Ishmael Reed’s write up of it from Rediscoveries II. From Reed’s essay–

The Ku Klux Klan may appear to be clownish, and inept to some, but they have one thing right. They do represent an “Invisible Empire,” of which, the kind of monkeyshines that go on in places like Forsyth County belong to those of a small ignorant outpost. On the day that some joker held a sign warning of welfare disaster if blacks moved into the county, a New York Times columnist and a book reviewer spread the same lie about welfare being an exclusively black problem, yet, I doubt whether demonstrators will march on the editorial offices of the Times.

Klan thinking goes on in the editorial rooms of our major newspapers, in the film, and television studios; and in the public schools, and universities whose white male supremacist curricula are driving Hispanic, and black children out of education. One hears Ku Kluxer remarks in places that present themselves as the carriers of “Western civilization” like National Public Radio where,recently, a man congratulated a musician for using the saxophone as a “serious” symphonic instrument. “Up to now,” he said, “the saxophone has merely been used to make ‘jazzy howls.’ ” In “the Invisible Empire,” George Shearing will always receive more recognition than Bud Powell, Paul Cummings more recognition than Cato Douglass, and racist mediocrities will always get more publicity and praise than John A. Williams.

Thomas Kendall’s How I Killed the Universal Man (Book acquired, 23 Jan. 2026)

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I started Thomas Kendall’s second novel, How I Killed the Universal Man last night. Good stuff so far. Blurb from publisher Whisk(e)y Tit:

John Lakerman, alternative current affairs journalist for donkeyWolf media, is sent to participate and report on a clinical trial for a newly developed, biopharmaceutical, antidepressant. While researching the article, and the disappearance of its lead researcher, Lakerman is drawn into a complex world of body augmentations, migrant labour, billionaires, a Virtual Reality Game and a series of fatally seductive mutations.

How I Killed The Universal Man is a transhumanist noir taking place in a near future where environmental disaster and the advent of biological A.I is leading to the radical reorganisation of consciousness. A narrative about the unknown forces structuring narrative’s necessity, How I Killed The Universal Man begins from the premise that reality is always virtual.

Richard Hell’s Godlike (Book acquired, 23 Jan. 2026)

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Richard Hell’s 2005 novel Godlike is getting a new printing from NYRB. Godlike reimagines the volatile Verlaine–Rimbaud dyad as a 1970s No Wave New York collision of art, desire, and language language language. Symbolist rebellion transmutes into downtown punk nihilism, drugs, and poetry. This corrosive Künstlerroman was originally issued by Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery (an imprint of Akashic books). Read the description/blurb at NYRB; here’s a taste from Chapter 15, around the middle of the novel:

They spent the greatest amount of their time together reading and writing and sometimes talking in T’s apartment. These were probably their best times too despite being experienced largely as tedium. They preferred the times of thrills, but the thrills grew out of the tension; and the mild, mildly restless, half-frustrated times of the many nights and late afternoons of doing almost nothing in T’s apartment, or walking the streets without direction, were their true lives.

T’s room was like some kind of glum office in its lack of daylight and its featurelessness, but with the little pictures now tacked on the walls, and the typewriter and sheets of paper, and the drugs, it got some character. He’d picked up a few stray pieces of furniture on the streets, including a table and three chairs, crates for shelves, and a beat-up old oriental rug. There was a secondhand portable record player too and a few albums.

They drank coffee and beer and sometimes codeine cough syrup and sometimes smoked some grass or snorted a little THC or mescaline and every once in a while a tiny bit of heroin, but mostly they lay around and lazily, impatiently goofed and wrote and complained, goading each other. Sometimes in the middle of the night one of them would go out for a container of fresh ice cream from Gem’s Spa. They’d go to a movie sometimes, or wander the rows of used bookstores on Fourth Avenue, or drink in a bar, but most of t he time was spent in the dim back apartment.

The days and nights were as endless as wallpaper patterns. Boredom and irritation were normal and lengthened out into sometimes-mean giggles and into pages of writing. Writing was their pay. Books were reality. The room was a cruder dimension-poor annex to the pages of writing. The writing, as casual as it was—smeared eraseable typing-pages with revisions scribbled on and crumpled pages of rejected tries—was the brightly lit and wildly littered universe erupting out from the dark, poor, inexpressive room.

How odd is it to have as a purpose in life the aim of treating life-in the medium created for the purpose of coldly corresponding to it, words—as raw material for amusing variations on itself? Sometimes T. and Paul fantasized about this, imagining themselves as godlike philosopher poets encouched in the advanced civilization, languorously sipping their fermented grain as they spun ideas and mental-sensual constructions of life-language in the air for the pleasure of their own delectation.

 

Guillermo Stitch’s The Coast of Everything (Book acquired, early Jan. 2026)

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Guillermo Stitch’s follow up to 2020’s Lake of Urine is The Coast of Everything, an enormous seven-hundred-and-something pager that with a matryoshka doll (decon)structure. I really liked Lake of Urine, a zany, slapstick surreal adventure story. The Coast of Everything of course intrigues me. It’s also pretty big! It’s been staring at me for a few weeks now, daring me to plunge into something deep. (I’ve been reading only short stories and nonfiction so far this year — story collections by Joy Williams and Robert Bingham, and a depressing and engrossing book called The Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp.) So anyway, I dipped in this afternoon, read the preamble, I suppose you would call it, and then dug into the first of what I take to be connected/nested novellas, “The Tale of the Enchanted Road.” I plan to keep swimming.

Indie publisher Sagging Meniscus’s blurb:

To find the center, begin at the edge…

A daughter’s devotion parts her from her father. A dutiful soldier sentences his daughter to a loveless exile and her mother to madness. With her last breath a dying woman exhales the whole world. A young girl with a broken body holds it up.

Their nested stories bleed into one another: tributaries in search of a common sea; parched souls in search of an oasis; ink racing through blotting paper.

A book with no ending and endless beginnings, The Coast of Everything—the long-awaited second novel from the author of Lake of Urine—is an astonishing masterpiece, epic, unfurling, baffling and beguiling. A gumshoe noir, a space opera; a multiverse melodrama, an adventure; a leap of faith, a call to prayer and a call to arms. It is a notification of our first duty wherever our humanity is threatened: to persist.

Includes two free recipes.

Robert Bingham/Harry Crews (Books acquired, 9 Jan. 2026)

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I finally gave in and picked up Robert Bingham’s books, the novel Lightning on the Sun and the collection Pure Slaughter Value.

Bingham was one of the founders of the literary magazine and press Open City. Open City published David Berman’s collection Actual Air in 1999. Bingham was friends with Berman and the Pavement boys. He was also the wealthy scion of an old Louisville family. He o.d.’d in ’99. Both Malkmus and Berman eulogized him in song — SM in “Church on White,” the Silver Jews in “Death of an Heir of Sorrows”:

I wish I had a rhinestone suit
I wish I had a new pair of boots
But mostly I wish
I wish I was with you

I think what really plugged the Bingham back into my brain was going through a July 1999 issue of SPIN magazine. I was looking for something else, but I found an old Pavement profile in which Bingham shows up early with bobo hockey tix. From the profile:

Pavement are standing outside Madison Square Garden, shouldering their way through tens of thousands of burly hockey fans. There’s a sold-out game about to start—the Rangers vs. the Mighty Ducks—and cops, peanut vendors, and entire families in matching red-white-and-blue Rangers jerseys mill about, blocking the sidewalk. “We’ve never gone to a hockey game together,” says bassist Mark Ibold. He is unceremoniously shoved aside by a squall of kids bearing cotton candy. “Usually we go see baseball games.”

Pavement pal Robert “Bingo” Bingham, a New York fiction writer, grows increasingly nervous as they approach the arena. He bought the band scalped tickets, an offense he’s been nailed for once before. “Should we come up with a fall-back strategy?” he says.

“Don’t sweat it, Bingo,” says bandleader Stephen Malkmus, still wearing the track suit and squash shoes he threw on this morning while awaiting clean laundry. The band is determined to get in, as percussionist Bob Nastanovich has already phoned his bookie to bet on the Rangers. “We don’t much care for the Ducks,” Nastanovich says.

“They’re all Steve Garveys,” adds the clean-cut Malkmus. Nastanovich takes a final drag from his Marlboro, then leads the group through the throngs to the ticket line. They cruise right in, home free—until a security squad catches up with them moments later.

“You aren’t going anywhere with those,” a guard says, motioning at the ticket stubs in Bingo’s hand. “They’re fakes.”

“Oh, please,” Bingo says. He knows they’re scalped, but fakes? A bit stunned, the band takes a look. “Well, yeah,” Ibold says. “I can see that.”

The printing is all faded and off-register.

“Mine looks like it was perforated with a cookie cutter,” says Nastanovich. Upon further inspection, they realize they all have the same seat.

Meanwhile, the Garden crowd is going ballistic. Christopher Reeve has just been wheeled onto the ice for the opening ceremony. Security hems and haws for a while, and finally takes pity on Pavement. A bearded fellow rests a cozy hand on Bingo’s arm. “You tell me who you bought these from,” he says, “and if he’s still out there, we’ll bust the fucker.”

Bingo hangs his head. “I don’t remember,” he mutters, and ambles off. Pavement trudge back to the street, reassuring their friend that the night is still young. They end up viewing the game at a nearby sports bar, and work on getting stinking drunk. Nedved is benched. Gretzky is checked. The once formidable Rangers lose handily, 4–1. Nastanovich looks up from his Bass Ale and shakes his head, laughing. He just lost $100.

I also couldn’t resist a signed copy of Harry Crews’ 1998 novel Celebration.

If you can make out the inscription, let me know. I think it’s to Frank, who was on the ultimate quest for…?

 

Joy Williams’ The Pelican Child (Book acquired, 27 Dec. 2025)

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I finally made it to The Lynx bookstore this weekend while visiting some old friends in Gainesville, FL. The Lynx was opened by novelist Lauren Groff and her husband Clay Kallman last year; its inventory emphasizes challenged and banned books, BIPOC and LGBTQ authors, and Florida writers. There was a nice selection of graphic novels, children’s books, and even some zines. A fair bit of the store’s inventory seemed to be given over to the kind of YAified fiction that sells well, along with a lot of books on contemporary social issues. A lot of those titles tended to skew towards what I think of as “in this house” politics — this ain’t your local anarchist bookstore — but it’s pretty well stocked.

I picked up Joy Williams’ latest collection, The Pelican Child, as well as copy of Williams’ history/guidebook The Florida Keys to give to my hosts, who spend six weeks in the Keys every summer. My wife also got the newest Alison Roman cookbook.

Gerhard Rühm’s The Folded Clock (Book acquired, drifted through, last week or the week before, end of 2025)

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I dug/was perplexed by Gerhard Rühm’s Cake and Prostheses a few years ago, so when I got my soft pink hands on The Folded Clock, (translated like C & P by Alexander Booth), I was intrigued. Publisher Twisted Spoon describes The Folded Clock as a collection of “number poems, comprising typewriter ideograms, typed concrete poetry, collages of everyday paper ephemera and scraps, and a wide variety of literary forms where the visual pattern created on the page underpins the thematic meaning.”

Rühm seems to identify Kurt Schwitters as his artistic precursor, or an artistic precursor. Like Cake and Prostheses, the pieces in The Folded Clock defy easy categorization — Is it a script or a poem or art? is probably the wrong question.

Passing eyes over the text is probably not the way to go; Rühm’s asking you to engage. As Joseph Schreiber puts it in his review at Rough Ghosts, you might follow Rühm’s directions and “allow yourself to read aloud and, there are you are, from the very beginning, not simply reading but actively engaging with the poem.”

I don’t really like numbers that much, at least not in a mob, a gang, a swarm. I tried and didn’t work out. Not just with this book but in general. I can’t count sheep, I guess.

I had a better time with Rühm’s forays into music and letters and collages; I enjoyed whatever psychotic version of minesweeper or Sudoku this piece is:

Michel Tournier’s Friday (Book acquired, 12 Nov. 2025)

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Michel Tournier’s 1967 novel Friday is getting a reprint (Norman Denny’s translation) from NYRB. Their blurb:

Friday is the Friday of Robinson Crusoe, and Michel Tournier’s retelling of Defoe’s tale of solitude and survival turns it on its head. Cast away on a tropical island, the God-fearing Crusoe hasn’t the least doubt what he must do: tame the wilderness and stamp it with the sign of civilization, a fool’s errand to which he devotes years and in which he comes close to succeeding. Then Friday shows up, infuriating him with his “irrepressible, lyrical, and blasphemous” laugh, and a new, more challenging task confronts the island’s self-proclaimed master. But after an unforeseen event destroys all of Crusoe’s work, it is up to Friday to teach him just how ignorant he is and always has been.

Friday was Tournier’s first novel, and it quickly found a wondering and delighted readership. Writing about the book in his autobiography, Tournier asks, “What was Friday to Daniel Defoe? Nothing: an animal, at best a creature waiting to receive his humanity from Robinson Crusoe, who as a European was in sole possession of all knowledge and wisdom.” In Friday, Tournier steps out of the secular world of the Western novel into the sacred precincts of universal mythology. The result is radiant, sensual, funny, and utterly unexpected—a modern masterpiece.

Pierre Guyotat’s memoir Idiocy (Book acquired, Oct. 2025)

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Pierre Guyotat’s memoir Idiocy is new in English translation from publisher NYRB and translator and Peter Behrman de Sinéty. NYRB’s blurb–

Pierre Guyotat was one of the most radical and uncompromising writers of the twentieth century, a literary successor to Sade, Bataille, and Genet whose visceral fictions and bold experiments with language have earned him cult status in France and abroad. Idiocy is his searing memoir of coming of age between 1958 and 1962, when he discovered his burgeoning sexuality and aptitude for rebellion—first against his father, whom he escaped to become a writer in Paris, then against the French military authorities as a conscript in the Algerian War.

Guyotat recounts the atrocities he witnessed first-hand in Algeria, as well as his own harrowing experience of being arrested for inciting desertion and imprisoned in a hole in the ground for three months. Guyotat wields his language like a scalpel, merciless in his exploration of human brutality in all its horrible, granular detail. Yet his generous depictions of camaraderie and friendship are just as unflinching.

The winner of the 2018 Prix Médicis, Idiocy is an incisive condemnation of violence and colonialism, and a bracing, hallucinatory late masterpiece from a writer hailed by Edmund White as “one of the few geniuses of our day.”

Gabrielle Tergit’s Effingers (Book acquired, 18 Oct. 2025)

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Gabriele Tergit’s 1951 novel Effingers is out in its first published English translation, by Sophie Duvernoy, from publisher NYRB. From Sandra Lipner’s English-language review of the novel (Lipner is reviewing the original German edition; she concludes the 2020 review by wishing for an English translation):

Tergit writes as both novelist and historian. Her protagonists are complex and so incredibly human that the book reads like a family biography written by a close friend, rather than a piece of fiction based on the author’s imagination. Tergit did write from experience: she was born in 1894 as Elise Hirschmann in Berlin and grew up in the world she describes. Her grandparents were practising Jews from southern Germany, and her upbringing gave her an intimate knowledge of Mathias Effinger’s world. According to her biographer Nicole Henneberg, the three houses featured in the book resemble her and her husband’s childhood homes. Only the fact that her protagonists’ politics, professions, and personalities are so expertly nuanced as to contrast with each other in a panoply of responses to historical currents and affairs suggests that the book is a work of fiction. Tergit’s attention to detail as a writer is astounding and allows her readers to immerse themselves in a world that no longer exists. By chronicling the lives of the two interlinked families across three generations and 70 years, and by including detailed descriptions of furniture, dress, and food, Tergit creates a panorama of a milieu that ceased to exist with the Holocaust. As a result, Effingers will be of interest to everyone who enjoys good fiction, cultural historians and readers with German-Jewish roots.

Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver (Book acquired, 14 Oct. 2025)

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Jan Kerouac’s first autofiction novel Baby Driver is getting a reprint from NYRB. Their blurb:

“Was it January or February? The coconut fronds waving, shining like green hair in the sun, gave no clue.” Fifteen-year-old Jan is pregnant, gamely living off rice and whatever fish her boyfriend John can catch in Yelapa, Mexico. Her sojourn there–both thrilling and heartbreaking–marks the beginning of a life of restless wandering. Jan Kerouac, the only child of Jack Kerouac, first published her autobiographical novel Baby Driver in 1981. Fearless and frank, Baby Driver is the story of a difficult childhood, marked by maternal warmth and paternal disregard, and of the heady freedom and precariousness of self-reliance.

Mattia Filice’s Driver (Book acquired, 26 Sept. 2025)

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Mattia Filice’s Driver is new in English translation by Jacques Houis. Here’s NYRB’s blurb:

Driver is a book about a young man from the provinces who moves to Paris and studies to become a train driver. As he learns about trains and their intricate workings, he is transported into a world in constant motion, with its own laws and codes and specialized language, its own heroes and legends and manifold dangers. Written in a style as surprising and eclectic as a night on the rails—packed with inside jokes and allusions that extend from Arthur Rimbaud to hip-hop and beyond—Driver takes us deep into the world of the train, until it becomes, like the ship in Moby-Dick, a microcosm of the world at large.

Drawing on twenty years of experience driving trains, Mattia Filice writes memorably about solitude and sleepless nights in the cab, accidents and breakdowns, but also about the lives and personalities of his fellow workers and the conversations and solidarity they share, both on the job and on the picket line, in what is a continual struggle to improve the conditions of work.

Unsentimental yet full of feeling, Driver is both an unusual and formally adventurous novel about labor and life and a stirring ode to the power of the collective.

Surprisingly, NYRB’s blurb doesn’t mention the novel’s striking style; on the page, the episodes of Driver look like poems that sometimes coalesce into prose. The chapter titles and section titles also seem to cast the novel as a take on knight’s quest. Compelling stuff.