Our Price: $16.80 | You Save: $7.20 (30%)   

2. "Cape of Storms"
by Nina Berberova; translated by Marian Schwartz
Publisher: New Directions
Forty-eight years after its publication in the Russian-language Novyi Zhurnal, this fine, wistful novel appears in English for the first time. Three half-sisters respond in very different ways to emigre life: Dasha becomes bourgeois, Sonia immerses herself in radical politics and philosophy, and little Zai writes odes to washing the kitchen floor. Distinguished by its elegant writing as well as myriad shifts in viewpoint and tone, "Cape of Storms" works soulful variations on the themes of exile, freedom, and loss. Read more

Our Price: $17.96 | You Save: $5.99 (25%)   

3. "Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies: A Novella and Stories"
by Ken Kalfus
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Ken Kalfus's second collection, "Pu-239," is a virtuoso feat of literary ventriloquism. Drawing on a mere four years spent living in the Soviet Union, Kalfus creates a kind of fictional survey of 20th-century Russian history, up to and including the encroaching chaos of the post-Soviet state. The title story alone is worth the price of admission; part tragedy, part farce, it follows a technician dying of radiation poisoning as he tries to sell stolen plutonium to the world's stupidest thugs. Read more

Our Price: $15.40 | You Save: $6.60 (30%)   

4. "The Oxford Book of English Verse"
edited by Christopher B. Ricks
Publisher: Oxford University Press
"The Oxford Book of English Verse" offers the perfect excuse to indulge in a little literary namedropping. Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, Pope, Blake, Wordsworth, Heaney, Gunn: all present and accounted for, along with names perhaps less familiar but no less worthwhile. This new edition of one of the world's finest poetry anthologies, edited by Christopher Ricks, combines the obscure with the well-known in a persistently surprising and revelatory mix. Read more

Our Price: $27.97 | You Save: $11.98 (30%)   

5. "Still Waters in Niger"
by Kathleen Hill
Publisher: TriQuarterly Books
Kathleen Hill writes prose with the emotional weight and lyric compression of verse. "Still Waters in Niger" follows a woman's return to the West African town where she once lived with her husband and three small children. In a series of gracefully written, lightly fictionalized meditations, Hill explores the various dislocations of Africa and motherhood and makes both look equally strange. Like the desert itself, this is a book alternately grim and magical, beautiful and bleak. Read more

Our Price: $17.47 | You Save: $7.48 (30%)   

6. "Bad Jews"
by Gerald Shapiro
Publisher: Zoland Books
Leo Spivak is a bad Jew. So is Ed Shifman. And painter Kenneth Rosenthal? He's so bad he added Call Waiting and Lack of Available Parking to the 10 biblical plagues. Gerald Shapiro's latest collection is, as you might expect, full of bad Jews--even though some of them have the best of intentions. Read these stories for a Passover Seder that turns into a food fight; for Hodgkin's disease as a tool of seduction; and for spiritual redemption via a Three Stooges-style whack to the head. Read more

Our Price: $16.80 | You Save: $7.20 (30%)   

7. "The Cape and Other Stories"
by Kenji Nakagami; translated by Eve Zimmerman
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
Vice is nice, but incest is best: these gritty stories document the lives of the Japanese underclass with all the linguistic power and formal daring of a Faulkner, Gorky, or Zola (Kenji Nakagami has been compared to all of them). Like Akiyuki, hero of two of the pieces collected here, Nakagami was born a member of the burakumin, Japan's little-known outcast minority. "The Cape" is both a visceral document of ghetto life and a literary achievement of startling force. Read more

Our Price: $10.36 | You Save: $2.59 (20%)   

8. "Strangers: A Family Romance"
by Emma Tennant
Publisher: New Directions
"Strangers" is a memoir--of Emma Tennant's family, no less--but it's also been called her "best novel to date." Small wonder: the book chronicles a childhood amongst eccentrics, aesthetes, and cross-dressing aristocrats, the kind of brilliant, quirky relations of whom unforgettable characters (and real-life prime ministers) are made. Distinguished by its wit, weirdness, and elegant prose, this is a memoir for anyone who has his or her own family ghosts--even if those ghosts don't come equipped with an ancestral castle. Read more

Our Price: $17.21 | You Save: $5.74 (25%)   

9. "So Vast the Prison"
by Assia Djebar; translated by Betsy Wing
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
An educated postcolonial Algerian woman struggles with the contradictions between modern life and ancient belief, in a novel as concerned with language and history as with the nature of love. Women-only ritual dances, bride thieves, sorceresses, gossip in the hammams (public baths)--Assia Djebar's "So Vast the Prison" is a rare glimpse into a world seldom seen, and to the author's manifest distress, even less seldom heard. Read more

Our Price: $19.57 | You Save: $8.38 (30%)   

10. "Girl in Hyacinth Blue"
by Susan Vreeland
Publisher: MacMurray & Beck
This exquisite series of stories--not so much linked as nested one inside another, like Russian dolls--follows a fictional Vermeer painting backward through the centuries to the time of its creation. Surviving loss, flood, theft, and the Holocaust, the painting witnesses its fair share of human frailty during the passage from one owner to the next. Yet Susan Vreeland's vision in "Girl in Hyacinth Blue" is far from dark; like the Dutch master's work, her book pays tribute to art's power to illuminate ordinary lives. Read more

Our Price: $12.25 | You Save: $5.25 (30%)   

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