There’s something daunting about the subtitle of Revulsion: Thomas Bernard in San Salvador by Horacio Castellanos Moya and translated from Spanish by Lee Klein. For one thing, it presumes familiarity with the influential, congenitally grave Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. For another, it’s a mouthful. One thing it isn’t, though, is false advertising: Revulsion, Moya’s fifth book to be translated into English, is indeed a work of imitation—a tribute and a parody as well as an original voice. The book describes the “intellectual and spiritual misery” of 1990s San Salvador, the capital of a

The news that the United States had killed 150 unnamed individuals in a country halfway around the world with which it is not at war generated barely a ripple of attention, much less any protest, here at home. Remote killing outside of war zones, it seems, has become business as usual. This is a remarkable development, all the more noteworthy in that it has emerged under Barack Obama, who came to office as an antiwar president, so much so that he may be the only person to win the Nobel Peace Prize based on wishful thinking.

Patrick Modiano’s work casts a wary look at personal and collective histories of the French mid-twentieth century. Rather than nostalgia, this looking-back is imbued with a “sense of emptiness that comes with the knowledge of what has been destroyed, razed to the ground.” Each of Modiano’s novels is, in the words of Adam Thirlwell, “a new restatement of a single unsolvable crime.” Whether that crime manifests as the sin of a whole nation (Nazi collaboration in The Occupation Trilogy) or the sin of one person (murder or betrayal), it inflicts a moral injury more than a material one: it is the

“Regrettably I don’t think my first language can be written down at all,” explains the unnamed narrator of Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut novel Pond, which leaves us in the idle hands of a woman who has abandoned academe and retreated, alone, to a stone cottage in the Irish countryside. Here, she has given herself over to a ripe compulsion to grammatize her experience of the world. “I’m not sure it can be made external you see. I think it has to stay where it is; simmering in the elastic gloom betwixt my flickering organs.” For the time being, she writes in English with a warped dexterity that

During the drained-out years of the 1960s and ’70s, when there was no public outlet for a frank conversation, Homo sovieticus would gather with friends in a Moscow kitchen, identical in shape and size to those in concrete apartment blocks all over the USSR. The radio would be turned to full volume, drowning out loose talk that might otherwise escape through pre-fabricated walls. The décor would display only muffled colors—the mediocre browns and grays of the Soviet everyday. On a shelf: a three-litre jar of birch juice, pickled cucumbers and a gray salami procured for a special occasion. The