Persona Non Grata
By Bill Marx First, I want to mention a couple of volumes that I unaccountably left off my World Books 2008 round-up of the best fiction and non-fiction candidates. No, it is not another salute to the current international fiction daring Roberto Bolaño, a fever fanned by the appearance of his huge tome “2666” in…
Read Moreby Bill Marx “Writing in the Dark” By David Grossman. Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen Farrar, Straus Giroux, 131 pages, $18 Israeli novelist David Grossman fears his country is losing its soul. In this stirring but slim collection essays on the intersection of politics and literature by celebrated Israeli novelist David (“See Under:…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx Earlier this month, Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, stoked up the cultural consternation machine when he implied that American writers are too provincial to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. American literary life is “too isolated, too insular” he opines, its writers don’t translate particularly well and they aren’t…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx Novelist and critic Dubravka Ugresic On this week’s World Books podcast I talk to novelist and cultural critic Dubravka Ugresic about her latest volume of trenchant essays and commentaries, “Nobody’s Home” (Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac). My conversation with Ugresic circles around her contention that, despite European enthusiasm for culture,…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx In his conversation with me for the World Books podcast, Irish novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry insists that, unlike imaginative writers in Eastern Europe, who seem to have dried up after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Irish authors are making good use of their recent freedom to talk about the corruption…
Read Moreby Bill Marx “If Borges is the writer who made Garcia Marquez possible,” observed Salman Rushdie, “then it is no exaggeration to say that Machado de Assis is the writer who made Borges possible.” Rushdie’s piggybacked history of the hemisphere’s premier intellectual ironists is correct but, at least until the last decade or so, Machado…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx “The Boys of Winter” Written by Barry Brodsky, Eric Small and Dean B. Kaner. Directed by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary. Presented by BKS Productions at Boston Playwrights Theatre, Boston, MA, through September 21. John Greiner-Ferris as the disgruntled vet in “The Boys of Winter” In his superb new essay collection “Writing in the…
Read Moreby Bill Marx The newspaper “Haaretz” recently reported that the family of George Khoury, an Israeli Arab student killed in a 2004 terrorist attack in Jerusalem, responded to his death with a generous gesture – it has helped finance a translation into Arabic of Israeli writer Amos Oz’s powerful 2003 memoir A Tale of Love…
Read Moreby Bill Marx Posthumous publication of a book by a great but grievously neglected writer gives posterity a chance to either rectify its mistake or compound it. The recent appearance in the “New Yorker” of a previously unpublished Janet Frame short story, which was deemed to be “too painful” for print in 1954, has generated…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx Now in its third year under the watchful eye of the admirable Whistler in the Dark Theatre, FeverFest presents a selection of Boston’s fringe groups in an evening of short performances, a sort of theatrical tasting event billed as a round up of “explosive work by vital young companies.” Tonight will be…
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