New Yorker Briefly Noted Reviews Four New Books: Smith, Lee, Lesser, Hutchinson

Key facts

• The New Yorker's Briefly Noted column reviews four new books.
• Katy Simpson Smith's novel The Maltese Version is published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
• The Maltese Version presents four sides of a story, each belonging to a different woman connected to Max, a literary translator.
• Max's mentor Herschel sends him to Malta to work on a collection by local poet Ana.
• Leonie, Max's girlfriend, sends her friend Rhoda to investigate when she cannot reach him.
• That Summer's End is by Lee Seong-bok, translated from the Korean by Anton Hur and published by Knopf.
• The opening poem of That Summer's End is titled "Feeling."
• Many poems in That Summer's End are titled for their subjects, including "Sea," "Mountain," "Cat," and "Child."
• Wendy Lesser's Berlin Before and After is published by Harper.
• Lesser describes Berlin's history as a "cautionary mirror" for the present.
• Lesser was born in California and is a secular Jew.
• Lesser began travelling to Germany in 2003.
• Berlin Before and After touches on Bertolt Brecht, Gerhard Richter, and Jenny Erpenbeck.
• George Hutchinson's Jean Toomer is published by Yale.
• Toomer is best known for the experimental 1923 work "Cane."
• Toomer's grandfather was the mixed-race son of an enslaved woman.
• Hutchinson writes that "the so-called separate races were products of false labeling."