Archipelago-Books

Book Review: “Second Star and other reasons for lingering” — Making the Case for Concentration

May 14, 2023
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The point of the revelatory exercises in Second Star is to mentally invigorate, to sharpen how we look at the things in plain sight that we take for granted.

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Poetry Review: “Acrobat” — The Beautiful Bengali Poetry of Nabaneeta Dev Sen 

September 26, 2021
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Translator Nandana Dev Sen has opened a window for us to savor Bengali women’s poetry through these lovingly translated poems of her mother.

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Book Review: “The Barefoot Woman” — A Survivor’s Eulogy

December 19, 2018
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The Barefoot Woman is lyrical but also informative and ethnographic, as much a memoir of a mother as it is of her way of life.

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Poetry Review: “Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania” — A Playful Polish Epic

October 17, 2018
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In his exhilarating translation of Pan Tadeusz, Bill Johnston captures Adam Mickiewicz’s wild fluctuations of register and brilliant associative riffs. The volume recently won the 2019 National Translation Award in Poetry.

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Book Review: “The Farm” — Obsessed With The Land

October 4, 2018
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There can be no future, Héctor Abad seems to be arguing, when everything you are is hidden away in a time you can never fully know.

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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: Antonio Tabucchi’s “Time Ages in a Hurry” — A Diary of Dreams

March 25, 2015
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Antonio Tabucchi’s fluid style moves easily from realism to surrealism, banal conversation to poetic free association, reportage to allusion.

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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: 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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