Americans love to eat foreign food, and hate to read foreign books. That’s the perception in publishing circles, anyway, and if there are obvious exceptions — I’m looking at you, Paulo Coelho — it’s still the case that even adventurous readers in this country aren’t always sure where to start once they reach the border. We’re here to help. Three of this week’s recommended titles are European novels: “Mirror, Shoulder, Signal,” by the Danish writer Dorthe Nors, “All for Nothing,” by the German writer Walter Kempowski, and “Kudos,” the conclusion of an exceptional trilogy by the British writer Rachel Cusk. Staying in the realm of foreign affairs, you might pick up Ronan Farrow’s “War on Peace,” about the decline of the United States diplomatic corps. And for people in this country or elsewhere who prefer to read about America and its ways, we have books (fiction and non) about Appalachia and Southern California, capitalism, criminal justice and more.
KUDOS, by Rachel Cusk. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) “Kudos” is the final book in Cusk’s trilogy of small, serious, flexible and emphatic novels that began with “Outline” in 2015 and continued last year with “Transit.” The thrust of the narrative, as in each of the previous books, is talk — stories from people Faye, a British writer, meets while she travels. “As trilogies of recent vintage go, these books,” our critic Dwight Garner writes, “strike me as a stark, modern, adamantine new skyscraper on the literary horizon.” Cusk “has that ability, unique to the great performers in every art form, to hold one rapt from the moment she appears.”
THE MIRAGE FACTORY: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles, by Gary Krist. (Crown, $27.) In “The Mirage Factory,” Krist marshals his considerable storytelling skills to capture Los Angeles at a critical moment: the period between 1900 and 1930, when an agricultural town of 100,000 people became a burgeoning city of 1.2 million, replete with new industries, a new identity and, crucially, newfound water. He tells that story by directing our attention to three individuals: the engineer and water czar William Mulholland, the filmmaker D.W. Griffith and the Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. “Krist is a nimble scene-setter, and it’s the indelible details he offers that give ‘The Mirage Factory’ its mesmerizing pull,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “You’ll finish it entertained, informed and satisfied, as well as ready for more.”
MIRROR, SHOULDER, SIGNAL, by Dorthe Nors. Translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra. (Graywolf, $16.) Nors, the darkly comic and wily Danish writer, is at her most unassuming and ambitious in this novel, which was a finalist for the International Man Booker Prize in 2017. It tells the story of Sonja, a single, 40-something translator of gory crime novels reeling from a breakup while living alone in Copenhagen. Nors has an intense fascination with aging, and with women who have resisted domestication. “We’re locked in Sonja’s consciousness,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes, “but the novel never becomes claustrophobic. Opening it feels like opening a window — there’s a bracing freshness and chill to the writing, and the unforced ease of a song.”
CALYPSO, by David Sedaris. (Little, Brown, $28.) In his new collection of comic personal essays, Sedaris — who is now 61 — grapples seriously with themes of family, mortality and illness. As always, his very essence seeps through the pages like an intoxicating cloud. “This entrancing collection of essays, and my fascination with its author,” our reviewer, Alan Cumming, writes, “sucked me into some nerdy netherworld where real life becomes weirder and funnier and darker and bleaker than, well, real life.”
ALL FOR NOTHING, by Walter Kempowski. Translated by Anthea Bell. (New York Review Books, paper, $16.95.) Until recently, the plight of the nearly 750,000 Germans who fled East Prussia in the last days of World War II remained a taboo subject in fiction. Kempowski’s novel, a work of lyrical melancholy originally published in German in 2006, conjures a privileged East Prussian family who must decide whether to join the exodus. Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim’s review calls it a “chamber motet that is finely blended,” well worth reading “as a literary response to a long-buried collective trauma.”
INSANE: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness, by Alisa Roth. (Basic Books, $28.) Roth offers a searing examination of how prisons have become the dumping ground for the mentally ill, where they are subjected to inhumane mistreatment. The book is “a devastating portrait of lives wrecked — or ended,” according to Sam Dolnick’s review: “It’s hard to read ‘Insane’ without concluding that the way the criminal justice system has dealt with mental illness is profoundly broken, and that its flaws have led to tremendous anguish.”
PROPERTY, by Lionel Shriver. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.) A collection of short fiction that becomes a wry catalog of the many ways an acquisitive urge can go astray. Renters become unhappy owners; a wedding gift prompts a battle among friends; a man and his father feud over £160 and the price of an airmail stamp. Stephen McCauley — who calls the book “assertive, frequently funny and altogether satisfying” — writes that “Shriver’s large and provocative body of work is evidence that she’s a writer with an imposing intellect, a wealth of firmly held convictions and a take-no-prisoners confidence in her own abilities.”
THE ELECTRIC WOMAN: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts, by Tessa Fontaine. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Fontaine’s assured debut recounts her training as a carnival performer, eating fire and handling boa constrictors, even as it traces her difficult relationship with her mother — sometimes its own sideshow act. The memoir “doesn’t shy away from the task of holding the ordinary and otherworldly in its hand, at once,” our reviewer, Rachel Khong, writes. “It’s herein that the book’s power lies.”
WAR ON PEACE: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence, by Ronan Farrow. (Norton, $27.95.) At a time when the Trump administration is gutting the State Department and filling foreign policy jobs with military officers, Farrow offers a lament for the plight of America’s diplomats, and explains why it matters. “His wry voice and storytelling take work that is often grueling and dull and make it seem, if not always exciting, at least vividly human,” Daniel Kurtz-Phelan writes in his review. “In a sense, Farrow is telling a story with a well-known ending but a surprise beginning. Much has been made of Trump’s disregard for diplomats. But the disproportionate flow of resources to military and intelligence solutions has been going on much longer, at least since 9/11.”
COUNTRY DARK, by Chris Offutt. (Grove, $24.) This family saga, featuring a Korean War veteran and his wife in the world of Kentucky moonshiners, is as dark as the title implies — violence and bad luck abound — but it is also profoundly humane. “The love in this book is deep and powerful,” our reviewer, Smith Henderson, writes. “Winsome twinkles shine through the blackness throughout, thanks in no small part to Offutt’s keen ear and eye.”
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