Caren Irr has read a lot of recent fiction, and she discusses it all in Toward the Geopolitical Novel, the first volume in Columbia University Press's new Literature Now series. As she notes in her introduction, she “began with winners of literary prizes,” selecting “those works with explicitly international subjects,” and then turned to the review pages of “the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, and Publishers Weekly” as well as “the review sections of . . . influential digital sources” and “recommendations made by independent booksellers with strong literary reputations” (9–10). The result is “a broad sample of international novels addressed to an American audience” indeed (10), and it is why Irr can casually inform us, with just thirteen and a half pages left to go in the book, that she is about to...
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May 1, 2016
