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Literary history credits Rainer Maria Rilke with establishing European poetry’s seminal concern with the duality between inner and outer worlds. Could it be that Comtesse Anna de Noailles was his precursor in this regard? Translator Norman Shapiro and Black Widow Press should be thanked for bringing her back into the discussion.
Read MoreIn an age where technology has made the improbable perfectly plausible, squeezed out spontaneity, and raised skepticism about the nature of reality, how can we still believe in miracles? This is the crux of the novel, made delightfully vivid and comic by César Aira’s prose.
Read MoreIn 1853, the Czech scholar Karol Jaromír Erben published “A Bouquet of Folk Tales,” which became a source-book for artists and composers, and “one of the three foundational texts of Czech literature.”
Read MoreYvan Goll may be the great shape-shifter, the Zelig, of twentieth-century poetry.
Read MoreTranslator George Kalogeris’s modernizing does what it should: It brings the poems into the thought-world where modern readers live.
Read MoreInstead of exploring his inner life at the time or his adult understanding of the institution that shelters him, Ngũgi wa Thiong’o draws a dispassionate and largely predictable report of boarding school life.
Read More“It’s Fine By Me” is the story of so many lost boys in literature, who run, who rebel, who are crushed, or luckily find their way.
Read MoreHelen Constantine’s new translation of Balzac’s “The Wild Ass’s Skin” serves this wonderful and weird book well. It is one of the great, black comic fables in world literature, a dazzlingly demented exploration of a society’s lack of imagination.
Read MoreIsraeli Stage’s readings are consistently the best attended in the Boston area, thus demonstrating that there is a great appetite for Israeli culture beyond folk dance and hummus.
Read MoreThis handsome edition of Yves Bonnefoy’s recent poetry and prose in English translation is a stunning presentation of a major poet.
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