World Books

Poetry Review: Nobel Prizewinner Vicente Aleixandre—The Poetics of Kissing

May 27, 2013
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This translation of “Poems of Consummation” is important for several reasons, one of which is that the 1977 Nobel prizewinner—despite the award—has long been insufficiently preeminent in our Anglo-American view of twentieth-century Spanish poetry.

Book Review: Israeli Novelist A.B. Yehoshua’s Fascinating “Retrospective”

May 23, 2013
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This fascinating book ends, leaving the reader with all sorts of questions — but that is exactly what really good fiction always does. Opening our minds, etching characters in our imaginations, and generating all sorts of possibilities.

Stage Review: A Pleasurably Formulaic “Best Friends” Via Israeli Stage

May 22, 2013
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Anat Gov does a fine job on the meta-playwriting level. “Best Friends” is a genre piece that is also an affectionate commentary on the genre to which it belongs.

Fuse Book Review: Inclement “Climates”

May 7, 2013
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While reading Andre Maurois’ “Climates” you feel your world narrowing in uncomfortable ways.

Book Review: “The Bottom of the Jar” — An Indelible Glimpse of Moroccan Life

April 25, 2013
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Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi’s autobiographical fiction draws deeply on his own childhood in Fez during the late 1940s and especially the 1950s.

Book News: Forget the Insufferable “Mr. Selfridge” — Turn to Zola’s “The Ladies’ Paradise” Instead

April 15, 2013
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Mr. Selfridge drives me nuts because the storyline, the rise of a mercantile empire, calls for edgy  Darwinian conflict rather than paternal benevolence sprinkled with layers of powered soap opera.

Poetry Review: Lapidary Ends — “Cut These Words Into My Stone”

April 12, 2013
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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.

Book Review: Meet Mikhail Kuzmin —The Oscar Wilde of Russian Literature

April 8, 2013
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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.

Book Review: Yves Bonnefoy’s Meditation on Poetry — Heady But Essential

April 7, 2013
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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.

Poetry Review: Poet Henrik Nordbrandt — Hovering Between Banality and Revelation

March 31, 2013
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“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.”

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