Date: 2011 Author: Jesse Ball No denying Ball’s essentialness. His uniquely nocturnal vision is that of a poetic alien taught…

Date: 1959 (2001) Author: Jim Brosnan Though baseball invigorates American prose by giving idiosyncratic heft to nostalgia and buffing up…

Date: 1970 (2010) Author: Paula Fox It all starts with a cat bite. Affluent, do-good Sophie Bentwood, a forty-something middle…

Date: 1979 (2003) Author: Thomas Bernhard, translated from the German by Sophie Wilkins Easy enough to lump Bernhard’s masterpiece into…

Date: 2011 Author: David Bezmozgis Bezmozgis’ first novel is a poignant and morally elegant portrait of a family of Latvian…

Date: 2007 Author: Peter Stamm, translated from the German by Michael Hofman Andreas is an unmarried Swiss schoolteacher in his…

Date: 2010 Author: Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews “The difficulty of finding warm places to sleep…

Date: 2006 Author: Cormack McCarthy McCarthy’s irrefutably American novel is Walt Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” muted and made barbaric alone. In…

Date: 2011 Author: Dan Barry Ostensibly the story of the longest baseball game ever played, a 33-inning, three-day minor league…

Date: 2006 (2008) Author: Alejandro Zambra Zambra’s itsy-bitsy but gripping novella has the texture of debris falling to earth from…

Date: 2010 Author: Javier Marías, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa “The person who has not been conceived…

Date: 2002 (2006) Author: Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Ann Borne By his own definition, 43-year-old writer Arvid…