Wow. Posthumous work from Roberto Bolano and David Foster Wallace and new novels from Francine Prose, Meg Wolitzer, Ann Packer and Chris Adrian are joys that will help to balance out the specter of the IRS deadline.
1. Between Parentheses by Roberto Bolano
© New Directions
New Directions, April 20, 2011
Chilean author Roberto Bolano is known for his fiction - particularly his award-winning novels The Savage Detectives and 2666, which was published posthumously and awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award . Between Parantheses is a collection of essays and articles that Bolano wrote during the last five years of his life.
2. Big Questions by Anders Nilsen
Drawn & Quarterly, April 12, 2011
Graphic novelist Anders Nilsen's Big Questions has been an ongoing series that now, collected in a single volume, constitutes his magnum opus. It is a story that revolves around a group of birds, an airplane crash, and a "slow fellow." More from this 2006 Interview with Anders Nilsen.
3. Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories of Work edited by Richard Ford
© Harper Perrenial
Harper Perrenial, April 19, 2011
Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar is a collection of stories about work from Stuart Dybek, Edward P. Jones, Charles D’Ambrosio, Ann Beattie, Alice Munro, John Cheever, Richard Yates, Deborah Eisenberg, Jhumpa Lahiri, and others.
4. My New American Life by Francine Prose
© Harper
Harper, April 26, 2011
Francine Prose's novel is a story within a story. Lula, a 26-year-old Albanian immigrant who works as an au pair in New Jersey, is encouraged by her employer to write a memoir titled My New American Life. The result is fast-paced, comical, and likely to draw more than one comparison to Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated.
5. Swim Back to Me by Ann Packer
© Knopf
Knopf, April 5, 2011
Ann Packer explores the emotional and psychological territory of family relationships in this collection that comprises a novella and five stories.
6. The Great Night by Chris Adrian
© Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 26, 2011
New Yorker 20 Under 40 author Chris Adrian delivers a bold retelling of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in a story of three broken-hearted lovers in San Francisco who find themselves embroiled in the affairs of the faerie kingdom.
7. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
© Little Brown
Little, Brown & Company, April 15, 2011
David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King, had been a work in progress from 1997 - shortly after the publication of Infinite Jest - until the time of Wallace's death in 2008. The Pale King's story surrounds the lives and work of IRS agents in a Midwestern office and one in particular by the name of David Foster Wallace.
8. The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer
© Penguin
Riverhead, April 5, 2011
Aristophanes' Lysistrata is an anti-war comedy in which a group of women stop having sex with their men as a means to stop them from fighting a war. In Meg Wolitzer's (The Ten Year Nap) new novel, the arrival of a drama teacher in the town of Stellar Plains, NJ is the start of a fascinatingly similar premise.
