John Taylor

Poetry Review: Pierre Reverdy’s “Song of the Dead” — Imprisoned in Life

February 7, 2017
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Despite one’s aspirations to another kind of reality, for Pierre Reverdy one is forced to return to one’s fetters.

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Book Review: “Eve out of her Ruins” — Mauritian Realities

January 26, 2017
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It would be a mistake to call the absorbing Eve out of her Ruins a mystery novel.

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Book Review: Getting coupled and uncoupled — Emmanuelle Pagano’s Mini-Studies of Love

November 8, 2016
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A perspicacious, multifarious, and compelling fictional field report on how we get hitched or unhitched, coupled or uncoupled.

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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 Review: “France: Story of a Childhood” — A Timely Memoir of Liberation

September 28, 2016
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France: Story of a Childhood is half personal essay, half autobiographical novel.

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Book Review: Dangerous Delusional Illusions — “A Cage in Search of a Bird”

September 7, 2016
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An absorbing and disturbing novel that explores the dangerous turns that erotomania can take.

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Book Review: Marguerite Duras’ “Abahn Sabana David” — A Rush Job

June 13, 2016
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Did Marguerite Duras, who had worked in the French résistance during the war, feel guilty about not having been sufficiently concerned about the Shoah?

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Book Review: Incurable Absences — Olivia Rosenthal’s novel about Alzheimer’s and Much More

June 7, 2016
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The author makes fully human an illness marked by absence and estrangement from humanity.

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Book Review: Antoine Volodine’s “Bardo or Not Bardo” — Seriously Spoofing the Afterlife

April 21, 2016
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One reads this strangely engaging book, like Volodine’s others, with a sort of knitted-brow amusement.

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Book Review: Mathematicians in Combat — Michèle Audin’s “One Hundred Twenty-One Days”

April 11, 2016
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Audin scrutinizes political commitment when it is undertaken by representatives of an intellectual discipline detached from the real world.

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