World Books

Fuse Book Review: The Subdued Yearning of “Guys Like Me” — The Sad-Droll Prose of Dominique Fabre

January 26, 2015
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Very little happens in Dominique Fabre’s books, yet one keeps on reading. because he so genuinely depicts the ordinary lives that most of us lead.

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Book Review: “The Man Between” — Homage to a Translator Extraordinaire

January 21, 2015
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The Man Between offers a fascinating glimpse of the late master translator Michael Henry Heim, its reportedly modest and reticent protagonist.

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Poetry Review: Rediscovering Aimé Césaire — The Politics and Poetics of Negritude.

January 8, 2015
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Valuable new translations of Aimé Césaire suggest that we have overemphasized the political dimension of his poetry and overlooked other, purely literary, qualities.

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Book Review: “The Hilltop: A Novel” — Serious Israeli Comedy

January 3, 2015
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Assaf Gavron’s sweeping, smart, often funny new novel spins a satiric update on Exodus.

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Book Review: “Nagasaki”‘s Diptych of Aloneness

December 29, 2014
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The success of this short novel set in Japan lies in the empathy it creates for a pair of ordinary and lonely characters.

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Book Review: Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” — A Translation That Respects the Nuances

December 6, 2014
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Marian Schwartz’s careful translation of Anna Karenina is exquisitely mindful of the book’s complex linguistic texture.

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Book Review: Émile Zola’s “The Conquest of Plassans” — “Tartuffe” Gone Realpolitik

December 5, 2014
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Entertaining yet incisive, The Conquest of Plassans remains a devastatingly acute reminder that religion and politics make surprisingly compatible bedfellows.

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Theater Review: Viva “The World Fixer” at Austrian Stage

November 30, 2014
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In this fiction and plays, Thomas Bernhard creates fascinatingly repugnant monsters, black holes of egotism that are symptomatic of our spiritual and moral myopia.

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Book Review: Enduring the Unendurable — Philippe Rahmy’s Extraordinary Portrait of Pain

November 30, 2014
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Philippe Rahmy is afflicted with brittle-bone disease: in his superb writing, he takes off from his incurable inherited condition and ventures out courageously.

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Book Review: “Havel: A Life” — A Splendid Biography of a Seminal Artist/Statesman

November 24, 2014
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What this magisterial biography does so well is give us an even-handed portrait of a remarkable, flawed man who is obsessed with a need to help the disenfranchised.

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