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 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 202013
American readers will be intrigued by a language for sexuality that is plain but understated, neither vulgar nor coy.
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.”
Nov 162012
Yvan Goll may be the great shape-shifter, the Zelig, of twentieth-century poetry.
Nov 092012
Translator George Kalogeris’s modernizing does what it should: It brings the poems into the thought-world where modern readers live.
Oct 312012
Instead of exploring his inner life at the time or his adult understanding of the institution that shelters him, Ngũgi wa Thiong’o draws a dispassionate and largely predictable report of boarding school life.
Oct 012012
“It’s Fine By Me” is the story of so many lost boys in literature, who run, who rebel, who are crushed, or luckily find their way.
Aug 152012
Helen Constantine’s new translation of Balzac’s “The Wild Ass’s Skin” serves this wonderful and weird book well. It is one of the great, black comic fables in world literature, a dazzlingly demented exploration of a society’s lack of imagination.
Mar 232012
Israeli Stage’s readings are consistently the best attended in the Boston area, thus demonstrating that there is a great appetite for Israeli culture beyond folk dance and hummus.
Mar 132012
This handsome edition of Yves Bonnefoy’s recent poetry and prose in English translation is a stunning presentation of a major poet.