Best European Fiction 2010
edited and with an introduction by Aleksandar Hemon, with a preface by Zadie Smith
Dalkey Archive, 421 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Why Translation Matters
by Edith Grossman
Yale University Press, 135 pp., $24.00
The Novel: An Alternative History, Beginnings to 1600
by Steven Moore
Continuum, 698 pp., $39.95
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
by David Shields
Knopf, 219 pp., $24.95
The many different narrative forms used in the collection Best European Fiction 2010, though frequently “experimental,” are hardly unfamiliar; stories are fragmented, seen from different angles, in ways that make it increasingly difficult to us to decide how much reality to attach to them or how much emotion to invest. In personal statements included at the back of the book, writers mention such models as Kafka, Borges, and Barthelme, suggesting that narrative experimentalism has become a literary lingua franca, an international convention.
