While reading Andre Maurois’ “Climates” you feel your world narrowing in uncomfortable ways.
May 072013
Apr 252013
Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi’s autobiographical fiction draws deeply on his own childhood in Fez during the late 1940s and especially the 1950s.
Apr 152013
Mr. Selfridge drives me nuts because the storyline, the rise of a mercantile empire, calls for edgy Darwinian conflict rather than paternal benevolence sprinkled with layers of powered soap opera.
Apr 122013
This anthology, made up of Michael Wolfe’s superb translations of ancient Greek epitaphs, begins in prehistory and ends in the sixth century C.E.
Apr 082013
Poet Mikhail Kuzmin, born in the 1870s into a family of Russian Old Believers, was a passionate exponent of gay literature in the early twentieth century.
Apr 072013
Yves Bonnefoy’s book is, fundamentally, a spiritual autobiography; yet it draws extensively on the outside world and ponders how it can be described in writing or depicted in painting.
Mar 312013
“Henrik Nordbrandt now holds a unique place in his homeland as its most celebrated national poet, who happens to have spent most of his adult life outside Denmark.”
Feb 252013
Autobiography, personal essay, history, current affairs, or literary criticism, many are the guises under which travel writing has seduced readers of decidedly categorical bent.
Feb 202013
American readers will be intrigued by a language for sexuality that is plain but understated, neither vulgar nor coy.
Feb 032013
Consider these few notes my handing The Porcupine of Mind off to you — you read it, you write about it, then we’ll come back and talk.
Feb 032013
Though written in 1984, The House of Jasmine’s description of widespread political corruption and social decay in the Sadat era is powerfully relevant to the uprisings of 2011 when Mubarak was ousted and that are still roiling Egypt today.
Jan 272013
Literary history credits Rainer Maria Rilke with establishing European poetry’s seminal concern with the duality between inner and outer worlds. Could it be that Comtesse Anna de Noailles was his precursor in this regard? Translator Norman Shapiro and Black Widow Press should be thanked for bringing her back into the discussion.
Jan 232013
In an age where technology has made the improbable perfectly plausible, squeezed out spontaneity, and raised skepticism about the nature of reality, how can we still believe in miracles? This is the crux of the novel, made delightfully vivid and comic by César Aira’s prose.
Jan 152013
In 1853, the Czech scholar Karol Jaromír Erben published “A Bouquet of Folk Tales,” which became a source-book for artists and composers, and “one of the three foundational texts of Czech literature.”
Jan 082013
Uzma Aslam Khan is a wonderful writer whose descriptions of the northern part of Pakistan and the fast fading way of life that had been lived there for hundreds of years are sometimes stunning.
Dec 082012
Touted in author Jonas Jonasson’s native Sweden as the perfect antidote to the grim noir Swedish trilogy that begins with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo this delicious book has sold over 3 million copies around the world.
Nov 162012
Yvan Goll may be the great shape-shifter, the Zelig, of twentieth-century poetry.
Nov 142012
By Bill Marx. Arts Fuse: Tell me how Leeches came about, given how different it is from your other books, at least those in translation. David Albahari: It is different from other books of mine. But then, there were several [...]