Orlanda ($22.00; Oct. 1; 224 pp.; 1-58322-011-9): Yet another reworking of Virginia Woolf’s fiction, this slippery 1996 novel from the veteran French author (I Who Have Never Known Men, 1997), who might be called a sophisticated hybrid of Margaret Atwood and Nathalie Sarraute. “Orlanda” is the name the protagonist, 30ish Aline Berger, dreamily assigns to the handsome young man (met in a train station) onto whom she projects her memories and fantasies of sexual experience, thus constructing a dual sexual being who is simultaneously herself and the object of her desire. It sounds fearfully involuted, but Harpman artfully shapes this lighthearted gender confusion into a witty comment on the incompatibility—and interdependency—of the sexes.
