Customer Comments

Hooray! I'm the first customer to review Satantango! Laszlo Krasznahorkai is one of the most creative, remarkable writers of our time. Written in 1985, just translated into English by the wonderful George Szirtes, this book is a masterpiece. Buy it now. Read it soon. The first line should convince you: One morning near the end of October not long before the first drops of the mercilessly long autumn rains began to fall on the cracked and saline soil on the western side of the estate (later the stinking yellow sea of mud would render footpaths impassable and put the town too beyond reach)m Futaki woke to hear bells.

In this very short book, Cesar Aira is totally entertaining. A low level bureaucrat, paid in counterfeit money, attempts a DIY taxidermy project of a fish playing a piano. Two kind Panamanian ladies radio instructions to golf club smugglers. An all-night writing frenzy begins as a non-fiction book, the subject of which the author knows nothing about, and ends up as a poetic masterpiece of Latin American poetry. A LOT of fun.

If a recommendation from Robert Bolano isn't enough to move you to read this, I certainly can't help. The great news is that the National Endowment for the Arts awarded the translator Katherine Silver a translation fellowship for three more works of contemporary fiction by this late Mexican writer Daniel Sada.

An odd and extraordinary book. A poet and self-taught healer in 17th century Iceland is exiled to a remote island for blasphemy by the local officials. A mix of mythology, magic and the dawn of scientific inquiry. At times a bit bleak and grim, other times sentimental and charming. The translation by Victoria Cribb is a joy.

These are eleven stories South African writer Ivan Vladislavic imagined but couldn’t write, or he started to write and couldn’t finish. He flushes those ideas out for the reader - some are quirky, some are very funny, and a couple of them are high concept. The Loss Library, the most complete story in the book, is a guided tour of a library of books that don’t exit. Books that would have been written had their writers not died young, books that were never written because their authors lost faith in them, books that came to authors in their dreams but were forgotten in the light of day. Beautiful illustrations and design by Sunandini Banerjee make this a book for those who appreciate the touch, the feel of a physical book and words that can’t be deleted, or lost.

Dark, bleak, captivating debut by a young German author. Think Gunter Grass + Samuel Beckett + Graham Greene.

I read Kafka on the Shore in a hammock in Mexico. Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, read in the relentless rain of the Northwest somehow edged it out. But there's no question as to my favorite author of the aughts. OK, l'm going to reread both of them.

Peter Linebaugh follows the rises, and mostly falls, of the protections guaranteed in the Magna Carta. Most interesting to see what the Great Charter actually does when it's combined with the lesser known Forest Charter. Restrained coverage of the Bush Administration's assaults on habeas corpus and prohibition of torture ( I mean, there's a whole other book there ). The book is capable of truly changing one's daily perceptions of our relationship to the Commons. Required reading for the we're-all-in-this-together, post-partisan, post red/blue crowd.