German novelist Daniel Kehlmann has a penchant for the figure who wakes with relief from one dream only to discover he has passed into another. In Kehlmann’s excellent historical novel Measuring the World (2006), the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss finds himself “lying on the plank bed and dreaming that he was lying on the plank bed dreaming that he was lying on the plank bed and dreaming. Uneasily he sat up and realized immediately that he wasn’t yet awake.”

That book’s international success has prompted the translation of a 2003 novel, Me and Kaminski, whose narrator, Sebastian Zollner,

Portuguese novelist José Saramago specializes in bold moves. In The Stone Raft (1986), the grand fabulist wrenched the Iberian Peninsula from its moorings; in Blindness (1995), he rendered an entire population sightless. A spry demiurge, indeed. Now well past eighty, with his Death with Interruptions—rendered in a pitch-perfect translation by Margaret Jull Costa—he challenges mortality itself while playfully subverting the timeworn theme of eternal life.

On the first day of the New Year, in an unnamed land, death takes a holiday. Initially, this calls for celebration. Before long, however,

Noir, Olivier Pauvert’s debut novel, is an examination of crippling paranoia within a future France, governed by a democratically elected fascist National Party and where a daylight curfew forces nonwhites to live in near seclusion. It is a cheerless vision, explored with great vim, that grows brutal at an alarming rate.

The dystopian thriller is narrated by an unnamed white man, who discovers the mutilated body of a young woman hanging from a tree. He is arrested for the crime and thrown into the back of a police van, but en route to a location out of town, the van crashes and the narrator

Just over one hundred pages long, Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine is a document that could, with a little effort, be ripped from its spine, stuffed inside a large bottle, and tossed end over end into the sea. The publishing history of Stanley Crawford’s sad, serene fiction resembles the fate of a message so transmitted, a hermetically sealed SOS riding out the decades. First issued by Knopf in 1972, the novel resurfaced sixteen years later thanks to Living Batch Press, with an aggressively drab cover resembling that of a Dover Thrift Edition. Now Dalkey has netted it from oblivion once

Laney Brooks is a woman in agony, suffering from an undefined malady that makes standard housewife ennui—boredom from carpooling or picking up dry cleaning—look like a picnic. Laney’s despair, ably depicted by Amy Koppelman in her affecting second novel, I Smile Back, is rooted in childhood. Specifically, it is tied to the abandonment of Laney’s family by her father and to her abiding sense of worthlessness. Laney’s adulthood has been marked by success (husband and beloved children, SUV, nice house in northern New Jersey) as well as self-destruction (affairs, drugs, alcohol abuse). And her

The Russian-literature allusions in Victor Pelevin’s novel begin right at the beginning. Not with the Lolita epigraph at the head of chapter 1—though that is anything but timid—but in the preceding “Commentary by Experts.” Here is the kind of textual apparatus that Nabokov so enjoyed, in which the voice of authority comically enhances the simulated nonfictional status of the text. And it’s not only Nabokov who classes up the joint in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, the tenth offering from Pelevin, himself Russian (and still only in his mid-forties). The author parcels out a dense array of

John Barth once likened postmodernism to tying a necktie simultaneous with providing a detailed explanation of the procedure while also discussing the history of neckties and still ending up with a perfect Windsor knot. It’s an entirely credible definition of the concept—some days I’d happily accept it in exchange for the whole of my small library on the subject—and charming, too. Barth’s always been a charmer, although at nearly eighty years old he’s more like the lovable old uncle who’s been entertaining the kids with that necktie routine for about fifty years than the onetime vigorous advocate