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

The work of António Lobo Antunes is held in such high regard that when José Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1998, there was grumbling that it had gone to the wrong Portuguese writer. Only about half of Lobo Antunes’s sixteen novels have made it into English, though. Now, Gregory Rabassa has translated his 2001 What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire? in a version so (predictably) elegant that at times I wondered whether the lowlife drag queens and junkies who people it sound so immaculate in the original.

The style is poetic stream-of-consciousness, with voices melting and melding

Best known for his jaunty, ruminative nonfiction books on such redoubtable topics as bachelorhood, melancholy, and the male body, Phillip Lopate last produced a full-length work of fiction in 1987—The Rug Merchant. Whence, then, this tart, mischievous set of novellas—Two Marriages—paired some twenty-one years later into one deceptively trim, provocatively entertaining volume? Such is the mystery out of which fiction, like married life, is made—and into which Lopate lustily delves.

In the first and longer work, The Stoic’s Marriage, a well-off forty-eight-year-old Spanish Catholic first-generation

Céline Curiol’s English-language debut, Voice Over, is a thoroughly French affair. Like much of Samuel Beckett’s work (the epigraph to this book is, quite appropriately, taken from Molloy), it chronicles, in relentless detail, an individual’s battle with a host of ontological neuroses that threaten to overwhelm her. And like Beckett’s worldview, Curiol’s is unremittingly bleak.

The anonymous “she” of the novel is a young woman who works as an announcer at the Gare du Nord in Paris. Given to fits of misanthropic rage, agoraphobia, and exhibitionism—she is, in other words, a knot of contradictory

“Thank you for asking me to submit to your magazine, / Dead Fluffy Coyote, / but I haven’t been writing much poetry lately. / I’ve been rockin’. / Or, I should say, rockin’ again.” In the swaggering opening lines of The Virgin Formica, Sharon Mesmer lays out its central conceit: that poetry is the least of her concerns––she’s been livin’ and will continue to do so, regardless of what the academic peanut gallery has to say about it. Often flowing down the page in lanky, listlike columns, her profane and funny poems venerate the vernacular and the blue-collar through rhapsodizing not just about