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.
New-Directions
Book Review: “In Memory of Memory” — Riven Recollections
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.
Book Review: László Krasznahorkai’s “The World Goes On” — Migrations of the Spirit
It is proof of the translators’ skill that Krasznahorkai’s sentences work as well as they do.
Book Review: Last Night A Book Saved My Life or….What To Read, or Not
I asked the venerable progressive publisher New Directions to send me what it has done for literature lately.
Book Review: “The Teeth of the Comb” — Brusque Tales of Rebellion
These tales have an incendiary energy, but Osama Alomar handles his narrative explosives with restraint, wisdom, care, and precision.
Book Review: Writer Delmore Schwartz — New Directions Gives His Volatile Brilliance its Due
Once and For All asserts the value of Delmore Schwartz’s provocative and multifaceted literary legacy.
Book Review: “Counternarratives” — Stories About History’s Metamorphosis
What John Keene has given us in Counternarratives is fearless fiction.
Book Review: Playing in the Shadows of the Modernist Giants
The 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.
World Books Update
By 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.
Robert Walser — Modernism’s Mystery Man
By 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 […]