From the cover of Esopus 23. Photo © Estate of David Gahr

Horacio Castellanos Moya published Revulsion in 1997, less than a decade after the official end of the Salvadoran civil war. The book—the first English edition of which is forthcoming from New Directions this July—began as an exercise in style, an attempt to ape the unrelenting antagonism of Thomas Bernhard. The result was a slender, scalding diatribe that brought Moya death threats and infamy. With no plot, no real action, and only the slightest sketch of two characters, Revulsion is barely a novel, and nowhere near its author’s best. (For that, try Senselessness or The She-Devil in the Mirror.) But its sprays of vituperation are often funny, and even nineteen years on, the book’s atmosphere of exasperated rage feels itchy, jagged, and real. —Robert P. Baird

You don’t have to be a Stones fan to fall in love with Rich Cohen’s The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones. Part rock history, part memoir, it’s so charming, so candid, such a mixture of sweetness and disillusionment and deep fanboy research, that I found myself reading the first four chapters out loud to Sadie—then staying up late, racing to finish, so she could take my copy. —Lorin Stein  

From the cover of The Swimmer.

Under the patter of Sunday’s rain, I read John Koethe’s newest book of poems, The Swimmer. At seventy, Koethe writes mostly of the ordinary things that comprise a lifetime—of “all the little / Accidents that make the days go by,” of “the human shit defining what we are.” Like the cats that live with us until their kidneys fail—“I sing the cat,” he says—or the model trains some of us collect, the great sex we have, the unexpected packages that wait for us on our porches. Despite Koethe’s fascination with the prosaic, nearly every line of his lets out the sigh of some existential dilemma. From Wittgenstein to Hume, Gottlob Frege to the Battle of Franklin, Koethe braids the philosophical, the mathematical, and the historical, into his verse. My favorite lines are still the ones that feel as though he’s slung his arm around my neck and pulled my cheek close to his as he points to “the small delights” before him: “On that apple tree there’s that fucking cardinal / Who reappears each year, plotting to shit on my car / Before I leave in the morning.” —Caitlin Youngquist

I spent last night with the enormous, lavish new issue of Esopus, which is, at the risk of fetishizing it, a tactile thing: it has fifteen different paper stocks, metallic inks, varnishes, die-cuts, booklets, prints, posters, and other stuff that will fall out if you shake it. But it’s an art object, not a novelty—the magazine’s luxe production values serve its contents well, giving them a spirit of intrigue that beguiles you into turning the pages. Of special note are Knausgaard’s essay “On the Value of Literature” (“It is surely a meaningless endeavor, an idiotic exertion leading to nothing, and yet it is exquisite, in its own singular way”); a vast series of found photographs from the last century, all of which had been hand-labeled “ME” by their subjects; and “Spray On,” a drizzly, oblique portfolio from Marilyn Minter that comes alive in the care with which it’s printed. —Dan Piepenbring

From the cover of Something Will Happen, You’ll See.

Douglas Adams died fifteen years ago last Wednesday, when I stumbled across a magnificent essay by Jess Zimmerman, written a year ago, about the sizable impact Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy had on both her adolescent psyche and her trajectory as a writer (the first was positive; the second, less so). A friend pressed me to read Adams’s book years ago, and after a few pages I knew why he’d been so persistent: in addition to being the funniest book I’ve ever read, the Guide puts the everything in the world—including and especially you, the reader—into perspective, albeit a rather frightening and vast perspective, one that, in the book, destroys minds. For Zimmerman, reading the Guide was profoundly influential and inspired her to want to write books that could do for others what Adams’s book did for her. But the anxiety of influence has proved more powerful, as has Adams’s inimitable genius. Her recognition of the immense sway certain books hold over us is remarkable, and the essay may or may not have made me tear up a little. See for yourself: “When I look at a bookshelf I see the books that are the scaffolding of my life, and all the other books I loved and all the ones I’ll never read, and the ones I’d hate, and the ones still being written and poised to become beloved or fall into obscurity, and the ones that could be written in the future, along with an invisible dot on an invisible dot marked ‘you are here.’ ” —Nicole Rudick

Something Will Happen, You’ll See—the title of Christos Ikonomou’s story collection, translated from the Greek, reads like a mantra for its characters, all citizens in the harbor town of Perama, left impoverished after the debt crisis in 2009. The hope in that title isn’t borne out in the stories themselves; each begins in the wake of a small tragedy that echoes the government’s fall from grace. Fathers die from having inhaled cargo-ship fumes all their lives, from gas explosions in factories; a brother is beaten nearly to death in a labor rights protest; a boyfriend steals his girlfriend’s piggy bank and takes off in the middle of the night. Something Will Happen is a heartbreaking and essential portrait of Greece’s modern despair, and while there are hopeful moments scattered throughout, the ones that ring truest are apocalyptic: “Outside it’s getting dark. Black birds sit rustling their wings on the electrical wires like notes on the staff of some strange music, some music written to be played on the last night of the world.” —Daniel Johnson

From the cover of Titus Groan.

It’s a torturous lull between Game of Thrones episodes. I’ve passed the time with Mervyn Peake’s novel Titus Groan, a refreshingly elevated take on the gothic: what it lacks in GoT’s military splendor it recoups in Tolkien-like quality of style. The novel is set in the decrepit castle Gormenghast, home to the noble family Groan, most of whom are so covered in dust that they seem to have calcified into extensions of the castle walls. For the family, a long-established pattern of ritual and routine is disrupted by the impending birth of the lord Groan’s heir, the titular Titus, and the arrival of young upstart Steerpike. Characters are styled almost exclusively through their perversions and flaws, which cast them as witless—and more often than not, creepy—caricatures of medieval aristocracy. It’s a comic novel, but not without its intrigue, mayhem, and murder. In other words, it should hold you over till Sunday. —Ty Anania

Maybe this internship has unearthed some latent Francophilia in me: the past two books I’ve mentioned in this space have been French, and now I’m happy to continue with Patrick Modiano’s Villa Triste. The novel’s nameless, abstractly fearful hero recalls the early sixties, when he absconded from Paris to a lakeside town near Switzerland. He finds a reprieve from his anxiety there: he meets an aspiring actress and a cosmopolitan doctor who guide him around the village on excursions reminiscent of the Lost Generation’s aimless hedonia. Modiano’s prose oscillates between brute force and delicacy, and he’s especially skillful in evoking the way memory can play with youth: serving as both a conduit and an excuse to fixate on (or fabricate) the past. Above all, memory for Villa Triste’s narrator functions as a panacea: “I was dreaming,” he says. “I therefore avoided making overly abrupt movements and asking overly precise questions so that I wouldn’t have to wake up.” —Rakin Azfar