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

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Chabon, Michael For sixty years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end. Homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. And in the cheap hotel where Landsman has washed up, someone has just committed a murder--right under his nose. When he begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, and Landsman finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, evil, and salvation that are his heritage. At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.

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)