fiction
In this novel, author Ismet Prcic’s confusion is so vivid that it becomes ours, making us participants in the story.
Read MoreIn “Train Dreams” the world of beauty and terror is balanced as only our best writers have been able to balance those things.
Read MoreThe wily Enrique Vila-Matas remains wary but respectful of Ernest Hemingway and asserts his independence by going on his own self-consciously vaudevillian way—Juan Gabriel Vásquez is too subservient to elude the shadow of Joseph Conrad.
Read MoreThis is adversarial criticism, with an eye on the martyred, fueled by grievances political and aesthetic — the return of the repressed as the comeuppance for the comfortable. No wonder Roberto Bolaño’s reviews garnered him fierce detractors as well as admirers.
Read MoreMost great novels generate an organic imaginative vision rooted in a sense of inevitability in the way they unfold; Chris Adrian’s THE GREAT NIGHT loses some steam because it fails to coalesce, to concentrate its myriad energies.
Read MoreIf you haven’t before had the keen pleasure of reading David Foster Wallace, THE PALE KING is a fine gateway drug. Its 550 pages are broken into 50 sections, each digestible on its own without reference to the larger work The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. Little, Brown, 560 pages, $29.99 By Michael de…
Read MoreSet in the beginning of the “Dirty War” of Jorge Rafael Videla’s military junta in Argentina, a period characterized by assassination and disappearance, “Kamchatka” is a superb novel that refracts public, political events through the sensibilities of everyday life. Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras. Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne. Black Kat, Grove/Atlantic, 311 pages…
Read MoreEditor Nicholas Frankel is right to argue that familiarity with Oscar Wilde’s original manuscript of The Picture of Dorian Gray deepens its vision, suggesting that the 1891 novel is a far less morally reassuring tale than readers have thought. The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition by Oscar Wilde. Edited by Nicholas Frankel.…
Read MoreRussian Winter is part mystery and part love story, drawing on the (overly) familiar tropes of each: the missing jewels, the deceived lovers, and so on. The material is not original, but it is workable and proffers plenty of Hollywood glamor. Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay. Harper Perennial, 496 pages, $14.99. By Nora Delany It…
Read MoreIn her second novel, Aminatta Forna gives us a moving story of the toll that the terrible civil war in Sierra Leone has taken and is still taking, years after it supposedly ended.
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