fiction-in-translation

Fiction Review: An Unforgettable “Life of an Unknown Man”

June 7, 2012
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In The Life of an Unknown Man Andreï Makine creates a work of simple elegance that at its core explores the relationship of the past to the present, of truth to art, and of truth to life.

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Book Interview: Damion Searls on “Amsterdam Stories”

May 17, 2012
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Written by a man who spent most of his life in a bourgeois harness, Amsterdam Stories focuses on the fleeting thrills of refusal, the chemical and philosphical rush that comes from floating free of responsibility.

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Book Review: Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence Opens

May 3, 2012
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Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s new museum, named for and based on his 2008 novel, The Museum of Innocence, has opened in Istanbul.

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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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Book Review: Two Old Men Singing of Wisdom

February 8, 2011
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These novels by the young, Indian writers Natacha Appanah, who identifies herself as French-Mauritian, and Rana Dasgupta take the form of memoirs of old men who look back on their lives, searching for the truth and the peace that comes with an understanding of the past. The Last Brother by Natacha Appanah. Translated from the…

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Book Commentary: Summer Reads for Adventurous Minds

June 24, 2010
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Poetry’s secret, it seems to me, consists of two ingredients: a love of this world and a curiosity about metaphysics. – Durs Grünbein, The Bars of Atlantis I resist the idea that books for the beach have to go down as easy as piña coladas. My eccentric and eclectic list of fiction and non-fiction in…

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Book Commentary: The Three Percent Solution

July 23, 2007
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By Bill Marx Fiction in translation deserves all the notice it can get, but it doesn’t do anyone any good to patronize writers and readers by duplicating the happy talk that is turning people off of blurb-ridden book reviews in the mainstream media. My friend Chad Post, formerly at Dalkey Archive Press, has begun a…

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Book Review: China’s Surreal Corruption

April 22, 2005
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A new novel by a Chinese dissident provides a comically stinging vision of his homeland.

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