The work of António Lobo Antunes is held in such high regard that when José Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1998, there was grumbling that it had gone to the wrong Portuguese writer. Only about half of Lobo Antunes’s sixteen novels have made it into English, though. Now, Gregory Rabassa has translated his 2001 What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire? in a version so (predictably) elegant that at times I wondered whether the lowlife drag queens and junkies who people it sound so immaculate in the original.

On April 26, 1998, Monseñor Juan José Gerardi Conedera was beaten to death in his garage with a chunk of concrete, a few days after he announced the publication of a fourteen-hundred-page, four-volume report on the atrocities committed by the military during Guatemala’s endless civil war. The report detailed in painfully unambiguous terms the torture, rape, and genocide perpetrated against Guatemala’s indigenous Mayans, thought by the military to be sheltering guerilla warriors.

A Manuscript of Ashes, Antonio Muñoz Molina’s debut novel (though not his first translated into English), reads as a primer on his work. Published in the author’s native Spain in 1986, it demonstrates his early postmodernist tendencies—particularly a predilection for narratives that shift in time and for shadowy narrators who destabilize the story. It also reveals the moral and philosophical issues that appear in his later novels, including the way in which the present embodies the past.

Best known for his jaunty, ruminative nonfiction books on such redoubtable topics as bachelorhood, melancholy, and the male body, Phillip Lopate last produced a full-length work of fiction in 1987—The Rug Merchant. Whence, then, this tart, mischievous set of novellas—Two Marriages—paired some twenty-one years later into one deceptively trim, provocatively entertaining volume? Such is the mystery out of which fiction, like married life, is made—and into which Lopate lustily delves.

One could thumbnail The Pisstown Chaos, David Ohle’s third novel in thirty-odd years, as a dark-comic fantasia, and the author himself as a long-term toiler in the fields of postwar American experimentalism. And yet he remains elusive, far more obscure than he deserves to be, and the book, like the rest of Ohle’s small oeuvre, is a bit hard to account for. His first book, Motorman, from 1972, could be situated within the vein of Barthelme et al.; but what came after—well, what came after was silence. Decades passed, the debut accruing cult status all the while, until the appearance

Céline Curiol’s English-language debut, Voice Over, is a thoroughly French affair. Like much of Samuel Beckett’s work (the epigraph to this book is, quite appropriately, taken from Molloy), it chronicles, in relentless detail, an individual’s battle with a host of ontological neuroses that threaten to overwhelm her. And like Beckett’s worldview, Curiol’s is unremittingly bleak.

The esteemed British novelist Barry Unsworth has been writing historical fiction for more than forty years and needs no lessons on its pleasures or its pitfalls. He is master of a comfortable form, having covered ground from the fourteenth century to the African slave trade to the frayed end of the Ottoman Empire and World War I—a terrain he returns to now, in Land of Marvels. Here he constructs his story around a somewhat defeated British archaeologist named Somerville, working in what is now, one gathers, western Iraq, unearthing traces of an Assyrian royal palace. Somerville is electrified by his

Joe Ashby Porter has a knack for finding life’s small moments, gilding them with flights of fancy, then letting them drift away. Sometimes he writes viscerally, as in this description of a body’s decomposition: “[Grandpa] Guo dwindles to a specimen cicada husk boxed and buried near Wanda below the frost line.” And sometimes he writes opaquely, as when old lovers reconsider each other: “Resumption should be a bodily karaoke, ready (even still) to be carried away, if just as happy with the slow and steady, old sobriquets welling up, thigh across thigh, tasting.” All Aboard, Porter’s fourth volume of stories,