Bill Marx
By Bill Marx Translator and poet David Hinton in the midst of nature. On this week’s World Books podcast I talk to David Hinton, an award-winning translator of classical Chinese poetry and philosophy. His latest book, which Hinton translated and edited, is “Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology” from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The wonderfully rich…
by Bill Marx “Writing in the Dark” By David Grossman. Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen Farrar, Straus Giroux, 131 pages, $18 Israeli novelist David Grossman fears his country is losing its soul. In this stirring but slim collection essays on the intersection of politics and literature by celebrated Israeli novelist David (“See Under:…
By Bill Marx Translator Ellen Elias-Bursac On this week’s World Books podcast I talk to Ellen Elias-Bursac, who translates the work of two of my favorite writers from the former Yugoslavia: David Albahari and Dubravka Ugresic. Elias-Bursac is currently living in the Netherlands, but she recently visited Boston, so I got a chance to talk…
By Bill Marx Earlier this month, Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, stoked up the cultural consternation machine when he implied that American writers are too provincial to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. American literary life is “too isolated, too insular” he opines, its writers don’t translate particularly well and they aren’t…
By Bill Marx Novelist and critic Dubravka Ugresic On this week’s World Books podcast I talk to novelist and cultural critic Dubravka Ugresic about her latest volume of trenchant essays and commentaries, “Nobody’s Home” (Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac). My conversation with Ugresic circles around her contention that, despite European enthusiasm for culture,…
By Bill Marx In World Books podcast #13 I talk to Angolan writer José Agualusa, who has garnered considerable praise in the Portuguese-speaking world, including comparisons to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. José Eduardo Agualusa at the Brooklyn Book Fair with Dedi Felman, his American editor, behind him. He has had three novels translated into English, each…
By Bill Marx In his conversation with me for the World Books podcast, Irish novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry insists that, unlike imaginative writers in Eastern Europe, who seem to have dried up after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Irish authors are making good use of their recent freedom to talk about the corruption…
Porochista Khakpour at the Brooklyn Book Fair. The late David Foster Wallace was her hero. By Bill Marx The latest World Books podcast features my conversation at the Brooklyn Book Fair with Iranian-American author Porochista Khakpour, whose first novel, “Sons and Other Flammable Objects,” earned accolades from “The New Yorker” as well as the “New…
by Bill Marx “If Borges is the writer who made Garcia Marquez possible,” observed Salman Rushdie, “then it is no exaggeration to say that Machado de Assis is the writer who made Borges possible.” Rushdie’s piggybacked history of the hemisphere’s premier intellectual ironists is correct but, at least until the last decade or so, Machado…
Breyten Breytenbach at this year’s Brooklyn Book Fair By Bill Marx On this week’s World Books podcast I talk to South African writer, painter, and human rights activist Breyten Breytenbach about his recently published book of mordantly fantastic fables “All One Horse.” In America, Breytenbach is known, if at all, for his four highly unconventional…
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