New-Directions
Kick the Latch (the title refers to what is done to open the starting gate in a horse race), through its plain and spare authenticity, is a powerful and impressive success.
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It is the loss of memories and the meaning of memory that dominate, generating speculations that draw the reader into and through Maria Stepanova’s argument and interpretations.
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It is proof of the translators’ skill that Krasznahorkai’s sentences work as well as they do.
Read MoreOnce and For All asserts the value of Delmore Schwartz’s provocative and multifaceted literary legacy.
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 MoreBy Bill Marx You want a racy, nineteenth-century epic about sex, sin, drugs, and prostitution set in China? Here it is. Two more pieces on international fiction for World Books, the feature I edit for PRI’s The World.
Read MoreBy Bill Marx Susan Bernofsky’s translation of Robert Walser’s 1908 novel won her a 2007 PEN Translation Fund Award. She’s followed that up by translating the Swiss writer’s first novel, “The Tanners.” A recent World Books podcast explores two recent translations from the German of novels by the mysterious Swiss writer Robert Walser, an author…
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