John Taylor

Fuse Book Review: “The Book of Beginnings” — Vive les indifférences!

June 8, 2015
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This study is an attempt to “enter” a foreign way of thought and to study the “possibilities” and, by extension, “potential mindsets” of the human mind.

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Book Review: When Fate Totters — Pascal Garnier’s Bleak Romans Noirs

April 7, 2015
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Pascal Garnier’s characters slip through cracks, cross borders, pass through the thin mirrors of the self, and commit irreparable acts.

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Book Review: “The Sexual Night” — Origins Unknown

March 21, 2015
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French writer Pascal Quignard strives to peer beyond, or behind, what psychoanalysts typically rationalize as the primal parental realities.

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Book Review: Using Words as Weapons — Alain Mabanckou’s Tribute to James Baldwin

March 11, 2015
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Like James Baldwin, Alain Mabanckou is striving to see beyond comforting or righteous notions and grasp a world full of movement, migration, diversity, and unexpected mixtures.

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Poetry Review: “It’s Like That If You’re Alive” — The Poetry of Tone Škrjanec

March 6, 2015
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Looking deeply into things and, by no means least of all, into other human beings implies meditating on brevity, on ephemerality—and this is what Tone Škrjanec does in this book.

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Book Review: At the Opaque Heart of Life — The Short Stories of Sait Faik

February 27, 2015
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Sometimes called the “Turkish Balzac” and, more often, the “Turkish Chekhov,” Sait Faik actually had a literary vision all his own.

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Poetry Review: Epiphanic Wholenesses — The Poems of Tsvetanka Elenkova

January 30, 2015
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Tsvetanka Elenkova is one of the key figures in contemporary Bulgarian poetry.

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Fuse Book Review: The Subdued Yearning of “Guys Like Me” — The Sad-Droll Prose of Dominique Fabre

January 26, 2015
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Very little happens in Dominique Fabre’s books, yet one keeps on reading. because he so genuinely depicts the ordinary lives that most of us lead.

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Poetry Review: Rediscovering Aimé Césaire — The Politics and Poetics of Negritude.

January 8, 2015
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Valuable new translations of Aimé Césaire suggest that we have overemphasized the political dimension of his poetry and overlooked other, purely literary, qualities.

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Book Review: “Nagasaki”‘s Diptych of Aloneness

December 29, 2014
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The success of this short novel set in Japan lies in the empathy it creates for a pair of ordinary and lonely characters.

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