Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World *** 1/2

The title, the unusual author's name, and the flying saucer on the cover all conspired to make me expect "eerily unsettling... delightful and funny" science-fiction stories. Not at all. Moshfegh's stories are firmly of this world, with characters who are unapologetically depraved or cruel. A drunk who keeps a sleeping bag in the classroom where she tries to teach high-school math; a women whose summer house is in a town she despises except for its meth dealers; an old man scheming to make a move on the young woman who moved in next door.

I find unselfconscious cruelty hilarious, because of how surprising it is when you're used to conventional characters. I liked these stories for the same reason I like reading Schopenhauer: great writing whose bitterness is over-the-top funny.

On the other hand, most of the stories lacked the narrative shape that would make them more than sketches. I'm definitely going to read Moshfegh's Booker-Prize nominated novel Eileen, in hopes that it pairs her dry humor with a complete story.

Donald Richie, The Inland Sea *** 1/2

The cover refers to The Inland Sea as "a masterwork of travel fiction by the West's finest writer on Japan." I think it's misleading to call it a travel book even though Richie does take a trip through the islands of the Inland Sea between Osaka and Hiroshima. (It's only as I'm writing this review that I notice the word "fiction" in there.) Richie is more interested in trying to convey something about the Japanese spirit than about Japan; the folklore and sociological generalizations are far more vivid than the physical descriptions. Its tone often reminded me of Sebald's The Rings of Saturn.  Richie's own peculiarities start to take over in the later pages, about the time he realizes that travel is really an attempt to find yourself.

Brian Doyle, The Plover ***

The Plover has a lot of elements that I really like. It's the story of a sea voyage, written with aplomb in an additive prose style, whose optimistic theme is the connectedness of all people and creatures. One character has a vision of a nation called Pacifica, which gives Doyle a chance to describe the Pacific Ocean from an interesting new perspective. Each chapter has a nice little woodcut illustration.

Unfortunately, though, the characters and the plot are underdeveloped. The Plover is the kind of novel where every character has a quirky trait -- the large silent deckhand, the finance minister who makes up words, the father with the long thin beard, the young girl who can communicate with birds -- and is completely defined by that trait. Not much happens in the plot, and what does happen depends on coincidences and "magic realism." None of this would be a problem if the outlandish elements interacted and added up to something, but they don't. Plus there's very little sailing talk.

Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer, eds., Into English *** 1/2

I absolutely love the idea behind Into English: A translator or poet picks a poem written in a language other than English, chooses three English translations of the poem, and discusses how the different translations approach the original and differ from each other. The theme, obviously, is the impossibility of translation. Noting the differences helps us triangulate toward the original.

It is indeed fascinating to see how word choice and differences between languages affects the impact of a poem. The translations are often quite different from one another, as the translators try to capture different aspects of the original.

As the editors say in their introduction, the rules dictate that only well-known poets are represented. (Less famous poets wouldn't have been translated into English at least three times.) Unfortunately, too many of the poems were not to my taste, and the commentators read more into them than I can see.

Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn ***

The high-concept description of Motherless Brooklyn is that it's a detective novel where the detective has Tourette's syndrome, and it's a strong novel for as long as it stays true to this concept. Unfortunately, it spends over a third of its pages on set up -- the story of the murder victim Frank Minna and the four orphans he takes under his wing -- and the set up lacks verisimilitude and character development. The resolution to the mystery is a bit outlandish too, but that's par for the course with detective novels.

Calvin Trillin, Killings ****

Killings is a collection of short pieces, originally published in The New Yorker during the late 1970s and early 1980s, about regular Americans who suffered a sudden death. A Kentucky landowner shoots a documentarian filming on his property; a Native American activist attempts to kidnap the mayor; a successful Iowa farmer (probably) kills his wife after starting a late-in-life affair.

Trillin packs a lot into fifteen or so pages. Each story has all of the elements you might expect in a novel. Many of them are more why-dunit than who-dunit, and Trillin is more interested in what the killings and their aftermath tell us about the communities than in the details of the killing itself. Solid bite-sized portraits of 1980s America, and fantastic source material for any writer looking for inspiration for a crime novel.

Akira Yoshimura, Shipwrecks ***

Shipwrecks has the feel of a fable. It takes place in a remote Japanese fishing village and tells of their timeless customs. The prose is simple and unadorned. The people cross a moral line in their quest to survive and suffer retribution for it.

During the winter months, the villagers light fires along the beach to distill salt from the sea. Their real purpose, however, is to lure ships onto the reef outside of the bay so that they can collect the bounty of their cargo... and kill any surviving crew.

Shipwrecks is a fairly short book, but it could have been more effective as a short story or novella. Many pages are dedicated to the village rituals and fishing techniques, described over the course of three years, and there are a few extraneous subplots. This material provides a richer sense of the subsistence-level life of the villagers, but it dilutes the power of the main story.