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Patricio Pron's "A Few Words on the Life Cycles of Frogs" appeared as one of the 22 selections featured in Granta's 2010 "The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists" issue. The award-winning Argentine writer (though still a couple of years shy of his 40th birthday) has written five novels and three collections of short stories. My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain is the first of Pron's novels to be translated into English and is an excellent, often emotional work.

Like so many works of Argentine fiction, My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain has at its foundation the haunting legacy of the nation's Dirty War. Pron's novel finds its expatriate pill-popping journalist protagonist returning to Argentina in advance of his ailing father's death, only to discover his dad's obsession with an unsolved local murder. As Pron's narrator attempts to uncover the crime's details — as well as the reasons for his father's fascination and fixation — he must also confront the nature of his own upbringing and the indelible mark left by the failed revolution upon generations of Argentinians.

In the epilogue, Pron goes on to highlight the factual events that inspired his novel. "While the events told in ...

Set in Leningrad during WWII, this is the story of two prisoners who get a chance to save themselves, but only if they can provide a dozen eggs for the wedding cake of the colonel's daughter. The entire city is starving and there is no food anywhere; people are eating the glue out of books and much, much worse...  Benioff has written a perfect book, somehow both horrific and hilarious!

This heartbreaking story of a Confederate soldier is absolutely riveting. Although Inman is gravely wounded, he deserts the army and heads back home on foot, keenly aware that he has the slimmest chance of making it alive. Trying to elude bounty hunters, starvation, and fear, Inman's journey is both harrowing and beautiful.

The Song of Achilles revisits the sprawling story of the Trojan War but focuses on the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. It is a love story so intensely searing, the brutal 10-year Trojan War somehow takes a backseat: the love they share means more than Helen, the war, and all of Greece put together. While Patroclus learns that he is much stronger than he ever imagined, Achilles learns, the hard way, about pride. Miller's take on this slice of Greek history is a passionate view of love amid disaster.

What a strange yet wonderful box of loveliness! Building stories is odd, sweet, sad, beautiful, and quixotic, yet that barely scratches the surface. Made up of what I can only guess are "chapters" in varied formats, with no true end or beginning, its sprawling size is a bit overwhelming straight out of the box. Yet the melancholy story of the tenants of an old building is fascinating despite (or maybe because of) the fact that it's a cartoon. It is an intimate look at the human condition; the stories of the old woman who owns the building, the constantly fighting couple, and the woman who lost her leg are close observations of human despair. Amazingly accurate in its depiction of interior monologue, each character is so complex, rich, and layered, the soul-crushing burden of their lives is keenly felt. Building Stories will make your heart ache for its characters, and it will make you realize that this tiny slice of life looks mighty familiar.

A modern day Huckleberry Finn with a twist of magical realism, Tom Wright's What Dies in Summer will leave you torn between page turning and savoring the luscious prose.

In the 1920s, married couple Jack and Mabel leave their home in Pennsylvania and travel to Alaska to homestead a farm. Still grieving the loss of their stillborn child years before, Jack and Mabel are faced with the inhospitable land and deadly weather of Alaska. Their marriage begins to unravel; Mable feels lost and alone, while Jack struggles under the unrelenting workload. In a rare moment of levity, on the night of the first snowfall, Jack and Mabel sculpt a snow child. The next morning they discover the statue destroyed and find footsteps leading away from the wreckage, but none to it. They slowly begin to realize just what they have set in motion, and both are terrified, yet hopeful, for the outcome. Both lyrical and magical, The Snow Child is a haunting, bittersweet, lovely read.

You can change your brain! Neuroplasticity is the new gospel for remapping your brain and making real changes to not only the way you think but how your brain is actually wired. Using this new science, medical conditions previously thought of as untreatable are cured, damaged sense organs are restored, and learning disorders are solved. If stroke patients can learn to walk and talk again in spite of damaged brains, then surely there is hope for the rest of us to manage our daily anxieties and undesirable behaviors. Dive into the future of neuroscience with this amazing book.

The great Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist, has spent some five decades in literary pursuit of restoring memory, veracity, and justice to their once-exalted heights. Resounding throughout his works are the amplified echoes of the forgotten, forsaken, silenced, and slandered. In giving voice to the voiceless, Galeano ensures that history's authorship shall not be entrusted solely to the wealthy, powerful, and victorious.

Children of the Days is composed of 366 of Galeano's trademark vignettes — one for every Gregorian calendar day of the year. Each of these entries, marked by both brevity and beauty, recounts or remembers an individual, moment, or era omitted from the official annals of yesteryear. In retrieving these stories from their historical exile, Galeano redeems their dignity and reanimates their tale. More than the mere act of commemoration alone, these vignettes illume the dark and disregarded corners of our collective past (and act, perhaps, as a bulwark against repeating its myriad misdeeds).

Like nearly all of Galeano's books, Children of the Days excoriates the excesses of war, religion, capitalism, and conquest. In reframing the historical narrative to be more inclusive and forthright, Galeano takes equal inspiration from politics, poetry, and the proletariat. Whether by revolution or revelation, ...

Marra's debut novel is fantastic. His beautifully written story so eloquently expresses the intricacies of human behavior involving love and sacrifice during a brutal war. It's hands down my favorite book of the year and one you must read!