The Girl on the Fridge by Keret, Etgar, Shlesinger, Miriam, Silverston, Sondra A birthday-party magician whose hat tricks end in horror and gore; a girl parented by a major household appliance; the possessor of the lowest IQ in the Mossad--such are the denizens of Etgar Keret's dark and fertile mind. "The Girl on the Fridge "contains the best of Keret's first collections, the ones that made him a household name in Israel and the major discovery of this last decade. There’s magic in each of these stories, yes, and there’s dreaminess, and ambiguity, and poetry, but ultimately when you read an Etgar Keret story you are getting the razor blade, undisguised by the bar of soap… Etgar Keret’s stories chronicle the current moment, and each is original, sudden and true. He writes about a quietly shocking world….His particular magical realism – as in “Without Her,” when a man’s landlord offers him a free extermination, and his apartment is covered with the corpses of bugs: some “the size of kittens” and one, “its belly covered with white spots… the size of a television,” and a seventy kilo bug, realizing it’s going to die, has hung itself from the light fixture with a rope -- always makes perfect sense. It’s never obscure or affected…The forty-six stories in The Girl on the Fridge, collected from earlier volumes of Keret’s work, are almost all set in contemporary Israel, on dusty, violent streets, in hospitals or lonely apartments or suburban homes. It’s a place of soldiers, politics, corpses and absences, and in the stories pop culture and history intermingle. – Reviewed in Bookslut

Year of Wonders by Brooks, Geraldine When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition. As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love. As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders." Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged hill country of England, "Year of Wonders" is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. Written with stunning emotional intelligence and introducing "an inspiring heroine" ("The Wall Street Journal"), Brooks blends love and learning, loss and renewal into a spellbinding and unforgettable read. "The novel glitters . . . A deep imaginative engagement with how people are changed by catastrophe." ("The New Yorker") ""Year of Wonders" is a vividly imagined and strangely consoling tale of hope in a time of despair." ("O, The Oprah Magazine") "Brooks proves a gifted storyteller as she subtly reveals how ignorance, hatred and mistrust can be as deadly as any virus. . . . "Year of Wonders" is itself a wonder." ("People ")

A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Horwitz, Tony Tony Horwitz fills in the blank (and decidedly bloody) century of American history between the voyage of Columbus in 1492 and the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620, breathing life back into forgotten Spanish conquistadors, Elizabethan colonists, and massacred Indians, dispelling historical myths and giving an additional nod to the Vikings, who settled briefly in Newfoundland around 1000 AD.--Arlene Cook, Watermark Book Co. (Anacortes, WA)