Villa of Delirium
Adrian Goetz, trans. Natasha Lehrer | New Vessel Press | 9781939931801 | August 2020
“In dazzling and seamless prose … Goetz achieves a modern-day Greek epic not easily forgotten. Villa of Delirium is, quite simply, a fever dream of art, history, ideas, and love in all its varieties—a seductive symphony of the intellect and senses. Highly recommended.”—Historical Novels Review
“Author Adrien Goetz knows his art: he teaches at the Sorbonne and edits the Louvre’s quarterly magazine Grande Galerie. It’s not all that surprising, then, that his novel Villa of Delirium crosses over with the art world in many ways. It’s about an affluent family who build a replica of a Greek palace on the Riviera, and follows their shifting fortunes over the course of the 20th century. Villa of Delirium is a historical epic that’s not afraid to grapple with questions of art and philosophy.”—Inside Hook
The Next Loves
Stéphane Bouquet, trans. Lindsay Turner | Nightboat Books | 9781643620053 | September 2019
“The Next Loves deserves a wide English readership because Lindsay Turner’s translation introduces a poet whose contribution to a transatlantic American literature is unparalleled. Bouquet’s poetry isn’t so much an import from France as an uncanny conceptual re-working of voices that readers of American poetry have heard before, but not in these registers or with these intonations. Like some of the most memorable poets of the last half-century, Bouquet is devoted to a poetry that earns, by its attention to the everyday, each flight into rhetorical excess.”—Full Stop
The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor
Amy Alznauer, illus. Ping Zhu | Enchanted Lion Books | 9781592702954 | June 2020
“Like the best children’s books, Alznauer’s words recognize the cleverness of their audience; they never condescend or talk down. Zhu’s work reminds us that illustrations shouldn’t flatten the world either. Fluent in the grammar of both abstract and representational art, her work is full of dimension and color, symmetry and asymmetry, life and breath. The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor holds potential enough to inspire its youngest readers, and to stoke the smoldering embers of curiosity in its oldest.”—Plough