World Books

Poetry Review: Yves Bonnefoy — A Provocative “Second Simplicity”

March 13, 2012
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This handsome edition of Yves Bonnefoy’s recent poetry and prose in English translation is a stunning presentation of a major poet.

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Book Review: Celebrating “The Flowers of War”

March 5, 2012
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A strange mix of characters who all have complicated pasts gives rise to a novel that blossoms — exactly as a flower does — into a complex drama that includes several points of view and a wide range of emotions.

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Book Review: The Print-Pantheist — Cyprian Norwid’s “Poems”

February 21, 2012
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In light of the many translations of Cyprian Norwid’s verse into English, Danuta Borchardt thought carefully about what she was going to focus on.

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Book Review: “Three Weeks in December”

February 15, 2012
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Some fiction can, literally, have the smell of too much research. And so, although I admire the ambition and scope of Audrey Schulman’s new novel, “Three Weeks in December,” I also feel that she made things harder for herself than she needed to.

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Book Review: Niccolò Ammaniti’s “Me and You” — a lightly charming, digestible morsel

January 27, 2012
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Italian writer Niccolò Ammaniti usually writes with an unadorned style about moral predicaments of the young in small-town Italy. “Me and You,” a slender effort in all respects, covers this ground as well, with the difference that fourteen-year-old protagonist Lorenzo Cumi is from an affluent Roman family.

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Poetry Review: Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer’s Divided Self

January 20, 2012
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Certainly part of the power of Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry resides in how, having established a jagged consciousness, he leaves us in between—in a world full of questions that are not easily resolved.

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Book Review: “The Secret in Their Eyes” — An Impressive Work of Art

January 19, 2012
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The novel is a brilliant psychological thriller, and several other things as well — a very quiet love story, a narrative of a remarkable friendship between two men, and an exploration of the corruption rampant in Argentine politics in the late 60s and 70s.

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Book Review: Flann O’Brien at 100 — An Enduring Comic Genius

December 20, 2011
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There is no way that The Arts Fuse was going to miss celebrating the 100th birthday of one of the greatest satirists of the 20th century — Irish genius Flann O’Brien.

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Book Review: Mahmoud Darwish — Palestinian Poet of Heritage and Exile

December 14, 2011
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Mahmoud Darwish, who died in 2008 at the age of sixty-seven, was best and heroically known for his complex perspective on political and spiritual borders — as both a poet and a spokesman for his Palestinian people.

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Book Review: Haruki Murakami — Marathon Storyteller

November 27, 2011
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In his dozen or so works of international best-selling fiction, Haruki Murakami has created an alternate-reality Japan that is at once magical and familiar, dangerous and comfortable, foreign but Westernized.

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