Bill Marx
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…
By Bill Marx A scene from the world premiere production of Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian’s “Of Mountains and Seas.” “Of Mountains and Seas: A Tragicomedy of the Gods in Three Acts” By Gao Xingjian. Translated from the Chinese by Gilbert C.F. Fong The Chinese University Press, distributed by Columbia University Press Filled with wise-cracking mythological…
By Bill Marx “The Boys of Winter” Written by Barry Brodsky, Eric Small and Dean B. Kaner. Directed by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary. Presented by BKS Productions at Boston Playwrights Theatre, Boston, MA, through September 21. John Greiner-Ferris as the disgruntled vet in “The Boys of Winter” In his superb new essay collection “Writing in the…
by Bill Marx The newspaper “Haaretz” recently reported that the family of George Khoury, an Israeli Arab student killed in a 2004 terrorist attack in Jerusalem, responded to his death with a generous gesture – it has helped finance a translation into Arabic of Israeli writer Amos Oz’s powerful 2003 memoir A Tale of Love…
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