Edition Additions: Long overdue.

New to the library: Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter and Decreation, Salvador Espriu’s Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth, and Juan Rulfo’s The Plain in Flames.

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Omnivore: Incoming!

Omnivore is a regular report on some of the things that I’ve been enjoying during the week (or thereabouts).

Except this week, it’s not. This week I’m going to tell you about books I’ve just placed an order for. Here’s what’s incoming in no particular order:

• The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, Zbigniew Herbert, Echo Press
• Gasoline, Quim Monzó, Open Letter
• The Restored Finnegans Wake, James Joyce, Penguin (Preorder)
• Antwerp, Roberto Bolaño, New Directions (Preorder)
• The Walk, Robert Walser, New Directions (Preorder)
• Dublinesque, Enrique Vila-Matas, New Directions (Preorder)
• The Passion According to G. H., Clarice Lispector, New Directions (Preorder)
• The No Variations, Luis Chitarroni, Dalkey Archive Press (Preorder)
• Replacement, Tor Ulven, Dalkey Archive Press (Preorder)
• Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth, Salvador Espriu, Dalkey Archive Press (Preorder)
• Blue Nights, Joan Didion, Fourth Estate Ltd (Preorder)
• The Planets, Sergio Chejfec, Open Letter (Preorder)

And a much belated birthday present for someone else.

Incredibly small sample size break-down:

2 out of 12 of the books are in English to begin with (though some may disagree about Finnegans Wake); the rest are Polish (1), Catalan (2), Spanish (4), German (1), Portuguese (1), Norwegian (1), assuming I didn’t make a mistake.

My favourite publisher appears to be New Directions (4), although I do have two Open Letter books (2) in mind that I just couldn’t preorder yet; Dalkey is in second place (3) because they released an excellent, excellent catalogue a week or so ago.

The most expensive book here is The Restored Finnegans Wake, but it looks very pretty and I figured that if it was going to join my library, now is probably as good a time as any with this fancy new edition; there’s a tie for the cheapest book, and they are Antwerp and The Walk, I think because they are both short books belonging to the same series.

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Dalkey Archive Press Spring/Summer 2012 catalogue.

The Dalkey Archive Press Spring/Summer 2012 catalogue is out. [pdf, via Dalkey Archive Press]

Notable releases for me are Vlad by Carlos Fuentes, Flowers of Grass by Takehiko Fukunaga, Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth by Salvador Espriu, and…

A cryptic, self-negating series of notes for an unfinished work of fiction, this astonishing book is made up of ideas for characters and plot points, anecdotes and tales, literary references both real and invented, and populated by an array of fictional authors and their respective literary cliques, all of whom sport multiple pseudonyms, publish their own literary journals, and produce their own ideas for books, characters, poems . . . A dizzying look at the ugly backrooms of literature, where aesthetic ambitions are forever under siege by petty squabbles, long-nurtured grudges, envied or undeserved prizes, bankrupt publishers, and self-important critics, The No Variations is a serious game, or perhaps a frivolous tragedy, with the author and his menagerie of invented peers fighting to keep their feelings of futility at bay. A literary cousin to David Markson and César Aira, The No Variations is one of the great “novels” of contemporary Latin American literature.

The No Variations: Journal of an Unfinished Novel by Luis Chitarroni. It simply sounds incredibly fun.

Of course I know that’s marketing hype. Doesn’t mean I won’t get excited about it.

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