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Book Review: “The Hilltop: A Novel” — Serious Israeli Comedy

January 3, 2015
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Assaf Gavron’s sweeping, smart, often funny new novel spins a satiric update on Exodus.

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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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Book Review: Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” — A Translation That Respects the Nuances

December 6, 2014
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Marian Schwartz’s careful translation of Anna Karenina is exquisitely mindful of the book’s complex linguistic texture.

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Theater Review: Viva “The World Fixer” at Austrian Stage

November 30, 2014
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In this fiction and plays, Thomas Bernhard creates fascinatingly repugnant monsters, black holes of egotism that are symptomatic of our spiritual and moral myopia.

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Book Review: Enduring the Unendurable — Philippe Rahmy’s Extraordinary Portrait of Pain

November 30, 2014
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Philippe Rahmy is afflicted with brittle-bone disease: in his superb writing, he takes off from his incurable inherited condition and ventures out courageously.

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Book Review: Into the Labyrinth of Fragmentary Memories — The Novels of Patrick Modiano

November 19, 2014
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The prose of Patrick Modiano, this year’s Nobel prizewinner, has a distinctive French style whose directness and grammatical limpidity by no means exclude semantic depth and complexity.

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Theater Review: German Stage — These Youth Don’t Want to Hear No “WhiteBreadMusic”

October 15, 2014
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In interesting ways, German Stage’s ongoing exploration of Germany’s immigrant populations provides a lens through which we can evaluate how we perceive our immigrants and how we treat them.

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Book Review: In Quest of the Elemental — André du Bouchet’s “Openwork”

October 13, 2014
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André du Bouchet writes the kind of poetry that other poets ponder, perhaps resist or even reject for a while, yet inevitably return to study even if (or because) their own poetics are starkly dissimilar to his.

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Book Review: Daniel Kehlmann’s “F” — An Amusing Look at Our Disjunctive Modern Life

September 24, 2014
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In F, vertigo is often palpable. Evil exists. “The terrifying beauty of things” does, too.

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Book Interview: David Albahari’s “Globetrotter” — The Postmodern Émigré Blues

September 18, 2014
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Serbian writer David Albahari’s fascination with uncertainty fuels a grim, sardonic tragi-comedy in which silence plays an elemental but enigmatic role.

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