World Books
Autobiography, personal essay, history, current affairs, or literary criticism, many are the guises under which travel writing has seduced readers of decidedly categorical bent.
American readers will be intrigued by a language for sexuality that is plain but understated, neither vulgar nor coy.
Though written in 1984, The House of Jasmine’s description of widespread political corruption and social decay in the Sadat era is powerfully relevant to the uprisings of 2011 when Mubarak was ousted and that are still roiling Egypt today.
Literary history credits Rainer Maria Rilke with establishing European poetry’s seminal concern with the duality between inner and outer worlds. Could it be that Comtesse Anna de Noailles was his precursor in this regard? Translator Norman Shapiro and Black Widow Press should be thanked for bringing her back into the discussion.
In an age where technology has made the improbable perfectly plausible, squeezed out spontaneity, and raised skepticism about the nature of reality, how can we still believe in miracles? This is the crux of the novel, made delightfully vivid and comic by César Aira’s prose.
In 1853, the Czech scholar Karol Jaromír Erben published “A Bouquet of Folk Tales,” which became a source-book for artists and composers, and “one of the three foundational texts of Czech literature.”
Uzma Aslam Khan is a wonderful writer whose descriptions of the northern part of Pakistan and the fast fading way of life that had been lived there for hundreds of years are sometimes stunning.
Touted in author Jonas Jonasson’s native Sweden as the perfect antidote to the grim noir Swedish trilogy that begins with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo this delicious book has sold over 3 million copies around the world.
Yvan Goll may be the great shape-shifter, the Zelig, of twentieth-century poetry.
By Bill Marx Arts Fuse: Tell me how Leeches came about, given how different it is from your other books, at least those in translation. David Albahari: It is different from other books of mine. But then, there were several things that made me, in the end, write the book. First of all, I wanted…
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