The Elliott Bay Book Company

With all the oddities roaming through Robert Lopez's work, it's easy to forget that behind each story is a writer mesmerized by language and writing about words—their rhythms and irregularities, the different ways they can be twisted, how they work together and what it sounds like when they're broken. Collecting twenty-nine pieces that, from sentence to sentence, read bleak to black-humored to all-too-familiar, Asunder is Lopez at his tinkering best.

For translators, few books pose as formidable and seductive a challenge as Rimbaud's unpaginated, fevered masterpiece, Illuminations. Here, seasoned translator and Pulitzer-prize winning poet John Ashbery answers that call and succeeds splendidly. Presenting each English translation alongside its French original, this dazzling edition breathes new life into the 19th century voyant’s kaleidoscopic world while sill preserving its intense vision and incomparable immediacy. The results are incandescent. Proof-positive that more than a century after he put down his pen and abandoned writing forever, our little Arthur is still miles ahead of everyone else.

Barry hannah is a mile-high storyteller whose maniac command of the English language always leaves me dizzy. Long, Last, Happy, Grove's loving tribute to the recently deceased Southern master, pulls together some of Hannah's best work—from his burgeoning career in the mid-sixties to 2010 and the final manuscripts he left behind. The results are, what else? Grotesque and hilarious and giddily haywire. An excellent collection.

In 1927, enigmatic Swiss writer Robert Walser began writing in a baffling set of tiny dots and scratches. Thought by many to be further evidence of his insanity, these ant-like pencil markings were actually an arcane, ultra-condensed Germanic script that allowed the author to write out entire stories on torn envelopes, small scraps of paper, the back of a business card. Microscripts collects twenty five of these pieces, presenting each work alongside a glossy, high-res facsimile of the microscript from which it came. A beautiful book, a beautiful object.

Solitary Swiss writer Robert Walser spent much of his life as a wanderer; drifting from job to job, town to town, family member to family member before finally succumbing to mental fatigue. While I hesitate reading too heavily into any author's biography, it's hard not to see the similarities in his work: an eerily locationless tone, stories that unravel right off the page, writing riddled with moments of boredom and euphoria, tedium and tangents, loneliness and delirium. Here his narratives and parables are deservedly given the NYRB treatment.

How to untangle the maddening, beautiful knot of Nabokov's Pale Fire? A novel of a novel on top of a novel. At once, a sendup of self indulgent writers, hot air academics and over zealous biographers, of fiction's lonely vacuum and Nabokov's own literary legacy. Then again, Pale Fire is a love letter to all of these things. Then again, there is a very large amusement park right in front of my present lodgings. Not to be missed.

The irregular account of a young boy's life lost inside his bizarre and forever shifting Polish shtetl. Presented in interlocking short stories, Schulz's world is an increasingly erratic place, one that mirrors the young narrator's equally erratic father, whose antics—from declaring that mannequins be treated as equals, to creating an aviary in his attic, to slowly becoming a vulture—compose both the heart of the novel and its eventual undoing.

A searing meditation on the immanent nature of human depravity as told through the lens of 19th century American expansionism. Blood Meridian follows a roving gang of bounty hunters seemingly hired to track down Apaches, though soon revealed to be an indiscriminate and unstoppable force of destruction that, as locusts, want only to devour. A novel of extreme violence and unparalleled poetry, McCarthy is at his aesthetic peak here; at turns transcendent and revolting, lucid and disorienting as he dives deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.