Recent Books of Particular Interest
May 1st 2015
MY STRUGGLE: Book 4, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Translated by Don Bartlett. (Archipelago, $27.) This is the fleetest, funniest and — in keeping with its adolescent protagonist — most sophomoric of the volumes translated into English thus far.
I REFUSE, by Per Petterson. Translated by Don Bartlett. (Graywolf, $25.) The themes of Petterson’s relentlessly autumnal novel are lost parents, chance and the unknowable mystery of others.
ONE OF US: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, by Asne Seierstad. Translated by Sarah Death. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) An exploration of the dark side of Scandinavia today.
INFAMY: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II, by Richard Reeves. (Holt, $32.) Reeves offers a vivid reminder of what war and fear can do to civilized peoples.
THE ROAD TO CHARACTER, by David Brooks. (Random House, $28.) The Times columnist provocatively extols the virtues of suffering, self-abasement and even a sense of sin.
MAP: Collected and Last Poems, by Wislawa Szymborska. Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $32.) Poetry both plain-spoken and luminous.
THE DO-OVER: Poems, by Kathleen Ossip. (Sarabande, paper, $14.95.) Sonnets, acrostics and prose poems ponder mortality and loss.
THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD: A Memoir, by Elizabeth Alexander. (Grand Central, $26.) The poet’s answer to her husband’s death is spiritual and ethical.