Ludwig Hohl belongs in the line of such lucidly contentious thinkers as Karl Kraus, Pascal, and Lichtenberg, commentators whose writing oscillates between the traditions of literature and philosophy.
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Book Review: “Strange Beasts of China” — An Exuberant Chinese Fantasy
The volume’s spirited imagination is strong enough to compensate for flaws in its translation.
Book Review: “What You Can See From Here” – Hopefully Romantic
There is enough candor and humor, along with a handful of bracingly moody characters, to make Mariana Leky’s vision of perpetual love compelling.
Book Interview: Translator Brian Nelson on Finally Hearing Émile Zola’s Voice in English
“Why read Zola now? Leaving aside sheer enjoyment of his narrative art, I’d say: because his representation of society’s impact on the individuals within it memorably depicts what it means to be a human being in the modern world.”
Book Review: “Difficult Light” — Words Are Amazing Things
A supple, evocative novel that meditates on family and loss and art.
Book Review: “The Family Clause” — Tribulations of a Family with No Name
Jonas Hassen Khemiri does little in The Family Clause to put his own spin on the usual domestic showdown of repression versus dreams of liberation.
Book Review: “The Turncoat” and “Marrow and Bone” — Two Revealing Looks at World War II
For each of these major, prize-honored writers — Siegfried Lenz and Walter Kempowski– birth = destiny = art.
Book Review: “Necropolis” — A Book of the Russian Literary Dead
This memoir offers an invaluable, broad look at intellectual Russia before and after the revolutions of 1917.
Book Review: Ilan Stavans — Literature as Resistance
Ilan Stavans’ latest book is an engrossing potpourri of this thinker’s continuing thoughts about language, culture, and the self.
Book Review: “Interior” — The Thing-as-Himself
Thomas Clerc’s novel reminds us of a stubborn truth: we are all narcissists that live to accumulate shit in rooms.