Croatian-born Ugresic spins a set of six interconnected tales with intelligence and verve. The first is a meditation on how stories come to be written, studded with references to Boris Ilnyak, who might, in Ugresic’s playful hands, be a fictitious Russian writer, but who is not. She introduces her theme as Ilnyak visits the temple of the fox in Kobe (“The fox is a totem of cunning and betrayal”; she also makes it the symbol of the storyteller). She writes of a writer being upstaged by the widow of a famous émigré writer, of Dorothy Leuthold, in whose presence Nabokov encountered a rare butterfly, and of a visit to Scuola Holden, an Italian MFA program named after Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Cunningly, Ugresic offers glimpses of that fox throughout this dense and delectable novel, translated from Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac and David Williams. (Credit: Open Letter)