Few dates on the calendar get shorter shrift than poor old November 18. Bereft of major holidays, all but anonymous, and cold — but not even cold enough to snow (at least in a lot of the U.S.) — it makes a strong claim for the year’s least notable day.
So spare a bit of pity for Tara Selter. When readers first met the narrator of Danish author Solvej Balle’s ongoing septology, On the Calculation of Volume, Tara was already on her 121st November 18 in a row. That number now stands well north of 1,100 (and counting) as the third installment of this mesmerizing time loop gets its English translation Tuesday.
For better or worse, though, her condition isn’t catching. Ordinary folks like us only get one swing at this half-digested hairball of a date each year, so we may as well seize the day. Better yet, with new books on the docket from Joy Williams, Simon Winchester and Tracy K. Smith, among other talented writers, we probably ought to stay inside reading until the 19th.
On the Calculation of Volume Book III, by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
While six of the novels in Balle’s seven-volume project have been published so far in the original Danish, this is the third to be translated into English, with the fourth expected in the spring. Don’t be misled by the author’s modest self-description – “just another time-loop story” – hers is an ambitious experiment nearly four decades in the making. “It takes a familiar narrative trope – a protagonist inexplicably stuck in the same day – and transforms it into a profound meditation on love, connectedness and what it means to exist,” said the judges who put Barbara Haveland’s translation of the first volume on the shortlist for this year’s International Booker Prize.
The Pelican Child: Stories, by Joy Williams
Williams is one of our most accomplished adepts in the art of estrangement — in literally making the mundane strange. The short stories in her latest collection are spiny little nuggets of jamais vu. Sure, they tend to bear the distinguishing characteristics of the familiar world, with all its stressed assistants and heiresses and bewildered man-children, but they’re also moved by some alien inner logic that can be disquietingly difficult to discern. In Williams’ hands, reality is a changeling with an occasionally wicked sense of humor.
Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times, by Tracy K. Smith
Speaking to NPR in 2017, Smith explained the human consolations of poetry in an era of disconnection and turmoil: It’s “a voice on a page that’s saying, ‘I have lived, I have felt, I have questions, and I have wishes.'” More than eight years later, the former U.S. poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner and onetime NPR NewsPoet is confronting today’s tumultuous moment by listening closer than ever to that voice on the page. In these essays, composed partly of close readings and broad commentary on the possibilities of poetry itself, Smith again proves to be an able ambassador for an artform.
The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind, by Simon Winchester
Winchester, a former reporter, can find a good story just about anywhere he looks, and the range of his gaze is simply enormous. From warzones and Wonderland, to precision engineers, natural disasters and not one but two books about the Oxford English Dictionary, the venerable storyteller has covered a lot of ground in the past half-century. This time, the noted subtitle enthusiast is taking to the air, literally, with a study of the phenomenon that shapes Earth’s climate and influences human history.
Atlas of Borders: Walls, Migrations, and Conflict in 70 Maps, by Delphine Papin, Bruno Tertrais, and Xemartin Laborde
Imagine you’re a visitor to Earth, trying to wrap your head around a world that now contains more than 8 billion people. There would be worse ways to try to understand all its seething complexities than cracking open this multiform portrait of community, disorder and change. This trio of French thinkers – which boasts extensive experience in geopolitical research, design and cartography – has assembled some 200 illustrations that seek to make sense of everything from the war in Ukraine and the ramifications of Brexit, to curious maritime borders and vast global migrations, with plenty of fun (and not-so-fun) facts scattered throughout.
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