The Barefoot Woman is lyrical but also informative and ethnographic, as much a memoir of a mother as it is of her way of life.
Archipelago-Books
Poetry Review: “Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania” — A Playful Polish Epic
In his exhilarating translation of Pan Tadeusz, Bill Johnston captures Adam Mickiewicz’s wild fluctuations of register and brilliant associative riffs. The volume recently won the 2019 National Translation Award in Poetry.
Book Review: “The Farm” — Obsessed With The Land
There can be no future, Héctor Abad seems to be arguing, when everything you are is hidden away in a time you can never fully know.
Book Review: “Cockroaches” — A Gruesome Story, Memorably Told
Scholastique Mukasonga’s autobiography, Cockroaches, examines the three decades leading up to the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda.
Book Interview: A New Take on Kafka — A Conversation with Peter Wortsman
The standard view of Kafka reduces him to the patron saint of neurotics.
Book Review: Antonio Tabucchi’s “Time Ages in a Hurry” — A Diary of Dreams
Antonio Tabucchi’s fluid style moves easily from realism to surrealism, banal conversation to poetic free association, reportage to allusion.
Book Review: At the Opaque Heart of Life — The Short Stories of Sait Faik
Sometimes called the “Turkish Balzac” and, more often, the “Turkish Chekhov,” Sait Faik actually had a literary vision all his own.
Poetry Review: Rediscovering Aimé Césaire — The Politics and Poetics of Negritude.
Valuable new translations of Aimé Césaire suggest that we have overemphasized the political dimension of his poetry and overlooked other, purely literary, qualities.
Book Review: “The fuzzy cinema of certain key events of my life” – Frankétienne’s “spiralist” novel “Ready to Burst”
Ready to Burst is a compelling, intricately structured story told in resourceful, oft-poetic language by a influential Haitian poet and novelist.
Book Review: “Our Lady of the Nile” — Prefiguring Rwandan Genocide
Because of the national tension between the Tutsis and the Hutus, and its effects on everyday routines in the school, this novel cannot long remain a bemusing tale of adolescent life.
