World Books

Book Review: “His Only Son” — A Delightful Discovery from Turn-of-the-Century Spain

December 1, 2016
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A splendid, absorbing read in which you feel as if you’ve been dropped onto the set of a Mozart opera.

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Book Review: A Complicated Story — Noh Theater and Modernism

November 19, 2016
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Carrie J. Preston refuses to characterize these cultural exchanges in moralistic or narrowly political terms.

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Book Review: Getting coupled and uncoupled — Emmanuelle Pagano’s Mini-Studies of Love

November 8, 2016
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A perspicacious, multifarious, and compelling fictional field report on how we get hitched or unhitched, coupled or uncoupled.

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Book Review: “Cockroaches” — A Gruesome Story, Memorably Told

October 12, 2016
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Scholastique Mukasonga’s autobiography, Cockroaches, examines the three decades leading up to the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda.

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Book Interview: A New Take on Kafka — A Conversation with Peter Wortsman

October 9, 2016
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The standard view of Kafka reduces him to the patron saint of neurotics.

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Book Review: “France: Story of a Childhood” — A Timely Memoir of Liberation

September 28, 2016
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France: Story of a Childhood is half personal essay, half autobiographical novel.

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Book Review: Dangerous Delusional Illusions — “A Cage in Search of a Bird”

September 7, 2016
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An absorbing and disturbing novel that explores the dangerous turns that erotomania can take.

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Book Review: “My Marriage” — An Extraordinary Rediscovery

August 12, 2016
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Despite the pain of inhabiting Alexander Herzog’s disintegrating world, I absolutely could not put My Marriage aside.

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Book Review: Marguerite Duras’ “Abahn Sabana David” — A Rush Job

June 13, 2016
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Did Marguerite Duras, who had worked in the French résistance during the war, feel guilty about not having been sufficiently concerned about the Shoah?

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Book Review: Incurable Absences — Olivia Rosenthal’s novel about Alzheimer’s and Much More

June 7, 2016
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The author makes fully human an illness marked by absence and estrangement from humanity.

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