Strange Escapes
When you can’t leave home, this is the way to LA beaches, 19th Century Japan, and 1960s Paris. Wonders abound in eight delicious, surprising, and unfettered fictions of voyages big and small.
The Blue Flowers, Raymond Queneau
Count Luna, Alexander Lernet-Holenia
Adventures in Immediate Irreality, Max Blecher
The Green Child, Herbert Read
The Fool and Other Moral Tales, Anne Serre
Mac’s Problem, Enrique Vila-Matas
The Fox and Dr. Shimamura, Christine Wunnicke
Mrs. Caliban, Rachel Ingalls


Proclaimed the Kafka of Romania by Eugène Ionesco, Max Blecher wrote this incandescent masterpiece shortly before his untimely death.

A romp through the ages, by a writer “who inspires newsletters, fan clubs, and passionate exegeses.” Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

At once a chase novel, black comedy, and softly keening death song, Count Luna starts off at a gallop and accelerates into warp speed

A visionary masterpiece filled with quicksand portals, revolutionary dictators, and subterranean worlds

Enrique Vila-Matas’s new novel is perhaps his greatest: “playful and funny and among the best Spanish novelists” (Colm Tóibín)