Although Mozzi’s stories have been excerpted in just about every magazine imaginable, this is the first full collection of his to be published in English. This Is the Garden won the 1993 Premio Mondello and astonished the Italian literary world for its commanding vision and the beauty of its prose. In the eight stories of this collection, we see a steady reworking of the idea of the world as a fallen Eden. Here, in Mozzi’s garden, quasi-allegorical characters seek knowledge of something beyond their shaken realities: they have all lost something and react by escaping, retreating from reality into a world, as Mozzi says, that is “fantastic, mystical, absurd.”

Or, in the words of Minna Proctor:

Gorgeously rooted in the best modernist tradition of writers like Italo Calvino and Antonio Tabucchi, Giulio Mozzi is among the most fiercely literary authors emerging from Italian literature today. These stories, which in so many different ways are about writing itself, are like rivers cutting through the northern Italian countryside—lush, limpid, exotic. Elizabeth Harris’s translation beautifully renders the noble grit of Mozzi’s distinctive voice.

If that doesn’t sell you on it, there’s also this bit of praise from Federico Fellini:

I read Giulio Mozzi’s first book with real enthusiasm. What struck me most was his everyday language. Even when his subjects rely on metaphor, his words are plain, and so turn mysterious.

Follow the link below to enter yourself in the GR drawing.

Is L’Amour then a novel? Yes, in the ordinary and hardly helpful sense that there is a story (or rather, several intermingled, fragmentary stories) and that the book, with its 98 pages of text, is longer than a novella. But from onset, the writing is novelistic in no mainstream way whatsoever. It is script-like without being a script, focused on the real world and on an initial character without being realist and hauntingly poetic without being a poem. [. . .]

Whatever the puzzling blend of hazy or composite characters and fragmentary storytelling there is in L’Amour, I would suggest that Duras is closer to truth than to fiction. Life can be like this. We see a woman or a man, and another woman or another man superposes him—or herself on the former. We project ourselves into others and project others into others—especially when amorous attraction and attachment is at stake. Duras was fascinated by the force and the pain of amorous emotions, as well as by indeterminacy as one of the fundamental aspects of our being in the world and our being with others. Because the voice of the narrator is so essential to and salient in a book like L’Amour, it can be deduced that this narrative indeterminacy accurately reflects the levels of consciousness of this outside observer who speaks so enigmatically yet authoritatively. [. . .]

For those of you who have never read Marguerite Duras, L’Amour is an invigorating place to start.

You can directly from our website, or, if you want to try your luck, we’re giving away 5 copies through GoodReads—just click below to enter yourself in the contest.

bq, Working in the traditions of Robert Walser, Robert Pinget, and Laurence Sterne, Ror Wolf creates strangely entertaining and condensed stories that call into question the very nature of what makes a story a story. Almost an anti-book, Two or Three Years Later: Forty-Nine Digressions takes as its basis the small, diurnal details of life, transforming these oft-overlooked ordinary experiences of nondescript people in small German villages into artistic meditations on ambiguity, repetition, and narrative.

Incredibly funny and playful, Two or Three Years Later is unlike anything you’ve ever read—from German or any other language. These stories of men observing other men, of men who may or may not have been wearing a hat on a particular Monday (or was it Tuesday?), are delightful word-puzzles that are both intriguing and enjoyable.

You can read an and you can click below to enter the drawing.

That said, since makes such a great gift for the holidays—especially for people interested in road novels or Bulgaria, as well as your easily confused friend/relative who is way into all the “Gray” titles involving a bit of the sex—and since we already have our copies back from the printer, we’ll ship these books out ASAP to anyone who

was co-winner of the Contemporary Bulgarian Writers award, and was chosen by Bulgarian readers as one of the top 100 “most loved books” as part of the BBC’s The Big Read. It’s funny, touching, sexy, and is currently being made into a movie. At it’s core, it’s a really moving road novel about loss that also involves a huge bag of marijuana.

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On a separate GoodReads note, the were announced today.

Now, as much as I love GoodReads, and as much as I love the idea of polling actual readers about the books they love, it has to be pointed out that the downfall of crowdsourcing an award is that you end up with J. K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy winning the fiction award.

Well, this summer (June to be exact), we’re going to be bringing out The Planets (translated by Heather Cleary), one of his earlier books that focuses on the Dirty War period in Argentina’s history. Although, seeing that this is a Chejfec book, it’s kind of more about the telling of the telling of a story of a friend of the author who disappeared and may have died in an explosion. It’s as masterful as My Two Worlds, and maybe even a bit more expansive.

Here’s the official jacket copy:

When he reads about a mysterious explosion in the distant countryside, the narrator’s thoughts turn to his disappeared childhood friend, M, who was abducted from his home years ago, during a spasm of political violence in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s. He convinces himself that M must have died in this explosion, and he begins to tell the story of their friendship through a series interconnected vignettes, hoping in this way to reanimate his friend and relive the time they spent together wandering the streets of Buenos Aires.

Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets is an affecting and innovative exploration of mourning, remembrance, and friendship by one of Argentina’s modern masters.

Anyway, if you want an advanced copy, click below and you could win one through the GoodReads Giveaway program. This contest closes on Monday, so enter right away . . .

This new book is in the same vein as the other Pilch titles we’ve published: it’s semi-autobiographical, very funny, dark, filled with shittons of drinking and women . . . Vintage Pilch.

Here’s a brief description:

“Our program breaks a book up into 100 scenes and measures the ‘DNA’ of each scene, looking for 132 different thematic ingredients, and another 2,000 variables.” A reader can go to the BookLamp site, which was launched in beta last week, and do a keyword search for titles that meet the criteria similar to a title they plug into the site. Pundits have dubbed it the “Pandora for Books,” though Stanton prefers the term “Book Genome Project.”

“Say you’re looking for a novel like the The Da Vinci Code. We have found that it contains 18.6% Religion and Religious Institutions, 9.4% Police & Murder Investigation, 8.2% Art and Art Galleries, and 6.7% Secret Societies & Communities, and other elements — we’ll pull out a book with similar elements, provided it is in our database,” says Stanton. [. . .]

But can a computer really accurately assess the content of a book? Stanton thinks so. “Our original models are based on focus groups,” he says. “We would give them a highly dense scene and a low density scene, for example, and ask them to assess them, which gave us a basis for training the models. Then we looked at books that might exceed the models and tweaked the formulas. In this way, our algorithms are trained like a human being.”

BookLamp quantifies such elements as density, pacing, description, dialogue and motion, in addition to numerous nuanced micro-categories, such as “pistols/rifles/weapons” or “explicit depictions of intimacy” or “office environments.”

I’m totally a sucker for this sort of shit . . . I think it’s great that people are finally thinking about how readers find books; I think it’s maybe detrimental to only read books that fit your fiction prejudices. (Of course, what example does the founder of Booklamp use in the interview? The fucking Da Vinci Code. Dear god, please make it stop.)

Knowledgeable recommendations used to be the function of booksellers, but since we, as a culture, seem not to need them (or bookstores) at all anymore, there are a number of book sites popping up to fill this void.

I’m sure this is over-simplifying, but there seems to be two major approaches to automated recommendations: the “similar user” approach, which is what Last.fm and GoodReads use and is based on the idea that if you like A, B, & C, and a lot of people who also like A, B, & C, also like Q, then you’ll probably like Q as well; and the “similar component” approach, which is what’s in play with Booklamp and Pandora and uses top down analysis to recommend books/music with components similar to books/music you like.

Personally, I prefer the first approach, and have never really gotten Pandora, nor do I see how my favorite books can be accurately quantified (The Sound and the Fury is 25% suicidal tendencies and 25% narrated by a mentally challenged character? Or The Crying of Lot 49 is 48% paranoia and 88% too cool for school?)

Now that two of the three recommendation sites are at least in their beta phases—Bookish is still in the works—it seems sort of worthwhile to check and see what these sites recommend . . . It’s one thing to talk about the theory and drool over hot catchphrases like “discovery” and “genome,” but another to find out that no matter what you put in, you’re told that you should read Twilight.

I’m not sure I can convince you of this, but I’m doing this test live . . . I haven’t looked up any of these books yet, so I have no idea what I’ll find. (It’s like live blogging! Which I believe is now called “tweeting.” Anyway.)

So, first up, the book I have tattooed on my arm—The Crying of Lot 49.

Booklamp: No results. Well that’s unfortunate . . . Skipped right over the paragraph in the Publishing Perspectives article about how they currently only have 20,000 Random House books in their database . . .

GoodReads: The Recognitions by William Gaddis, The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth, Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone, Falconer by John Cheever, Call It Sleep by Henry Roth.

OK, not so sure about the last couple, but the GoodReads recommendations are fine. Gaddis rocks, but I love JR more than The Recognitions, and Sot-Weed isn’t even close to my favorite Barth book. Still, not bad. Predictable, but not bad.

Since Booklamp is so limited in scope, I’m using their “Author Browse” function to find a good example . . . And oh, look, they have a listing for The Sound and the Fury! My snotty prediction about what the make up would be was pretty crap . . . Instead of confused narrators and philosophical issues about time, the five most prominent “StoryDNA” elements according to Booklamp are: Financial Matters, Family Connections, Domestic Environments, Automobiles & Vehicles, and Nature/Forests/Trees. The fuck?? Seriously? This does not bode well . . .

Booklamp: Sanctuary by William Faulkner, Moon Women by Pamela Duncan, Leo and the Lesser Lion by Sandra Forrester, Good-bye Marianne by Irene Watts, and Telling Lies to Alice by Laura Wilson

GoodReads: Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara, Loving by Henry Green, The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen, Under the Net by Iris Murdoch, and An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

Although they aren’t the first authors that come to mind when I think of William Faulkner (I was expecting Flannery O’Connor), I do love me some Henry Green and Elizabeth Bowen. And to be completely frank, I have no fucking idea what any of the Booklamp recommendations are. Irene Watts? Leo and the Lesser Lion?? Maybe I’m just ignorant and missing out on great fiction . . .

Leo and Lesser Lion. Listed by the publisher as Juvenile Fiction: A heartwarming family story set during the Depression that reads like a classic.Everyone’s been down on their luck since the Depression hit. But as long as Mary Bayliss Pettigrew has her beloved older brother, Leo, to pull pranks with, even the hardest times can be fun. Then one day, there’s a terrible accident, and when Bayliss wakes up afterward, she must face the heartbreaking prospect of life without Leo. And that’s when her parents break the news: they’re going to be fostering two homeless little girls, and Bayliss can’t bear the thought of anyone taking Leo’s place. But opening her heart to these weary travelers might just be the key to rebuilding her grieving family.

Oh, my. Booklamp fail. “Juvenile Fiction”?? I’ll bet $1million that there’s not a single stylistically interesting about this novel. And I’ll also bet that there’s no possible way I’d read this book and be like, “wow, I’ve never read a book more like Sound and the Fury than Sandra Forrester’s little gem!” Fuck. And no.

So far Booklamp is coming in a distant second . . . And exposing all the flaws of this top-down recommendation approach. This system really doesn’t seem to account for writing style, which, in my opinion, is maybe the most important feature of any work of fiction. Sure, it’s got “automobiles” and I do like to read about people who move from one point to another, but if the writing is shitty, there no number of “automobile/vehicle” scenes that will save a novel. And how do you identify the “genome” for exciting writing? (Not to bang a dead drum, but this is why booksellers and librarians and actual readers are so goddamn important.)

Let’s try one more, this time with feeling: Independent People by Halldor Laxness.

Booklamp: the first four are all Laxness books, which seems a bit of a cheat, so I’ll skip those . . . The Writer and the World by V.S. Naipaul, Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol, Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte, A Country Doctor by Sarah Orne Jewett, and Walt Whitman’s Secret by George Fetherling

GoodReads: Njal’s Saga by Anonymous, Angels of the Universe by Einar Mar Gudmundsson, The Pets by Bragi Olafsson, The Blue Fox by Sjon, and Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun.

Interesting to end with this book . . . Booklamp’s recommendations are a lot less country-specific compared to GoodReads. But on the whole, I think I like the GoodReads recommendations better, especially since they include one of our books.

There’s no conclusion to this post except that I find this all very interesting in theory, and flawed in execution. I’m sure both of these sites (and Bookish) will get better and better as time goes on and data accumulates, and will play a larger role in how books find an audience as booksellers continue to decrease in number . . .

Here’s an example from the opening paragraph:

There are more than a million people living in the city of Prague whom I’d just as soon not name here. Our family is originally from the country. Our family, that means me, my wife, and two tolerable little boys.

(It’s that “tolerable” that’s so fantastic.)

As the story progresses and the reader gets more and more attuned to the quirks and clicks of the narrator’s voice, the funnier this gets. Even when our friendly narrator is doing very odd things to innocent guinea pigs . . .

Anyway, to share our love of this book with the rest of the world, we decided to give away 10 copies via So if you’re a member, be sure to click this handy little widget below to be entered into the drawing.