Marigold and Rose is a magical and incandescent fiction from the Nobel laureate Louise Glück. “Marigold was absorbed in her book; she had gotten as far as the V.” So begins Marigold and Rose , Louise Glück’s astonishing chronicle of the first year in the life of twin girls. Imagine a fairy tale that is also a multigenerational saga; a piece for two hands that is also a symphony; a poem that is also, in the spirit of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis , an incandescent act of autobiography. Here are the elements you’d expect to find in a story of infant twins: Father and Mother, Grandmother and Other Grandmother, bath time and naptime—but more than that, Marigold and Rose is an investigation of the great mystery of language and of time itself, of what is and what has been and what will be. “Outside the playpen there were day and night. What did they add up to? Time was what they added up to. Rain arrived, then snow.” The twins learn to climb stairs, they regard each other like criminals through the bars of their cribs, they begin to speak. “It was evening. Rose was smiling placidly in the bathtub playing with the squirting elephant, which, according to Mother, represented patience, strength, loyalty and wisdom. How does she do it, Marigold thought, knowing what we know.” Simultaneously sad and funny, and shot through with a sense of stoic wonder, this small miracle of a book, following thirteen books of poetry and two collections of essays, is unlike anything Glück has written, while at the same time it is inevitable, transcendent.

A beautifully written prose work, Tsing is a multi-layered narrative that combines a wholly fictional novel-within-a-novel with an episodic chronicle of the narrator's present as a traveler to and visiting writer in the United States. Much more than an "ordinary" postmodern text, Tsing is a quiet and moving paean to the narrator's deceased father. Beginning with a series of imagined vignettes involving a father and a daughter, Albahari weaves both real and imagined narrative fragments together with considerable skill. As Albahari's fragments - simple stories about persons approaching each other, spending some time together, and eventually going their separate ways - accumulate, his deft combination of paradox and poetry provides a kaleidoscopic view of memory, love, and loneliness.