You do this work long enough, you find one. Lupe opened the door on a couple who had OD’d in their underwear, a needle hanging from the woman’s arm.

João Gilberto Noll died this March at the age of 70. Widely known (at least for a writer of fiction) in his native Brazil, Noll’s reputation is only beginning to be made in the Anglophone world.

This is a kind of love story. The kind of love when the world is war.

Set in the South during the 1970s, at the heart of Kat Meads’s In This Season of Rage and Melancholy Such Irrevocable Acts as These is change: a changing belief system, a changing setting, and a changing world altogether.

They emerge naked from the sea. They are blue-faced after swallowing lungfuls of air, their long, fat legs wobbling to hold their bodies upright. They speak in a language consisting only of mimicking fishes’ soft-spoken blub-blub-blub.

A winner of the European Union Prize for Literature in 2012, Jana Beňová’s Seeing People Off (Plán odprevádzania) was published last month in a stunning English translation by Janet Livingstone.

I knock on my sister’s door to make sure she is still alive. When she opens it, she is not dead, but she does have a swollen finger.

Even those readers who have never been to the Midwestern United States, never seen the plains of Kansas nor the peaks of the Ozark Mountains in Missouri, never dipped a fingertip in the ice-cold lakes of Illinois and Wisconsin, the wind cutting like the blade of a newly sharpened knife, will, after reading Casey Pycior’s debut collection, feel a kinship…

Research — to search — sounds glamorous, romantic, even adventurous. Indiana Jones does research. That dimly mulleted man Tom Hanks plays in The Da Vinci Code does research. A noble and globe-trotting — perhaps perilous — seeking out of the truth!