H. Castellanos Moya's novel of "tyrantmemory." Fiction, page 63 Valerio Magrelli's synthesizing ingenuity. Verse, page 73 Alan Sillitoe's authorized biography. Miscellaneous, page 76 A Book Review Editor'sApologia Maria Johnson Have you everwondered how thebook review editor (evidently that would beme) ofWorld Literature Today goes about selecting a particular group of titles to appear in each issue? Perhaps an alien mother ship hovers over a tamper-proof chute anchored to our building and on command rapidly ejects (in alpha order by author, of course) the cho sen lineup. Or do groups of sleep-deprived authorswith coffee stains on their shirts surreptitiously leave advance reading copies on WLT's doorstep? I often tripover piles of them (thebooks, not theauthors) as I negotiate thenarrow passageway tomy office.Surely these volumes have been carefully chosen through a process ofmeticulous sifting through endless waves of publishers' catalogs, literaryperiodicals, websites, blogs, and so on. A certain amount of this sort of obsessive activity necessarily goes on, but in reality I have long since given up on an anal literaryflowchart-likeattempt at plucking theabsolute best of each season's crop. Considering the sheer numbers of books pub lished (more thana thousand books every day in the US and UK alone, according to unesco), it would be lunacy to think itpossible?short of a computer program written by anMIT Wunderkind and an army of compliant internsentering relevant data?to make a quantifiably justi fied set of choices. And so,with a deep sigh, Ido admit tooftenusing a combination of educated guesswork, what's thison the shelf, close your-eyes-and-point methodology. The mathematical scheme would not only prove unsatisfactory on a practical level, itprobably would not be much fun.Nor might itretain thatpeculiar glow ofmagic that sometimes hovers over thebest books. Discovering a beautiful piece of writing can be akin tounearthing a buried treasure; theaha!moment, the second glance, the settling into a comfortable chair to fullysavor the experience?choosing books tendsmore toward serendipity than science. There will always be a number of excellent books overlooked (and for that I apologize) as well as a few less-than-extraordinary included (at least for some tastes). For each book chosen, thousands must be excluded. But in theend there may well be thatraregem that will inspireor provoke, lead thereaderhome, orbecome a guide tonew and unexplored territory. FICTION Cesar Aira. Ghosts. Chris Andrews, tr. New York. New Directions.2008. 139 pages. $12.95. isbn978-0-8112-1742-2 Ghosts,published inSpanish in 1990, may provide the best evidence to consider the enigmatic Cesar Aira an accomplished and prolificwizard of odd. Since 1975,he has published over sixty short novels. That is in addition to articles, critical notes, reviews, translations, and some rep resentative essays, collected in Por tuguese.He is an acquired taste,and his followers in English are becom ing legion now thatNew Directions ispublishing hismost representative fiction. What matters in Aira's work are the ideas and the construction of narrative, not roles in the plot or their relation to characterization, setting, theme, or any convention. That is not always the case, and in just about every interview,he con tradictshis previous assertions,with nuanced and humorous explana tions. It is thusnot surprising that in Ghosts thenarrator asks if literature is thearchitecture of theunfinished, templates for never-ending stories, a query that inmost of his fiction leads inevitably to digressions that are convincingmainly as deviations. In Ghosts, those forays are about pygmies, Australians, art (a leitmotifand ubiquitous template), and potlatch, reducing plot to a ...