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Book Review: Incurable Absences — Olivia Rosenthal’s novel about Alzheimer’s and Much More

June 7, 2016
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The author makes fully human an illness marked by absence and estrangement from humanity.

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Book Review: Antoine Volodine’s “Bardo or Not Bardo” — Seriously Spoofing the Afterlife

April 21, 2016
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One reads this strangely engaging book, like Volodine’s others, with a sort of knitted-brow amusement.

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Book Review: Mathematicians in Combat — Michèle Audin’s “One Hundred Twenty-One Days”

April 11, 2016
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Audin scrutinizes political commitment when it is undertaken by representatives of an intellectual discipline detached from the real world.

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Book Review: Stories by Korean Women — Sad Brilliant Inventions

April 10, 2016
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What could have been excursions into monochromatic despair are elevated, through resourceful inventiveness, into exhilarating journeys.

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Book Review: “The Big Green Tent” — Lives Lived Without Trust, Memorably Conveyed

December 18, 2015
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We root for all of the ordinary folk who survived — and are still surviving even now — one of the bleakest and saddest periods in Russia’s history.

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Book Review: “The Pilgrim’s Bowl” — Approaching the Enigma of Painter Giorgio Morandi

November 9, 2015
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Beautifully produced by Seagull Books, The Pilgrim’s Bowl is an invaluable introduction to both painter and poet.

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Book Review: “Death by Water” — Imagination, Masterfully Redeemed

October 29, 2015
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Death By Water plumbs the depths of the human condition in an entirely original way.

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Book Review: Patrick Modiano’s Maximal Minimalism

October 23, 2015
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These three books by Patrick Modiano are short, intense, and sensuous.

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Book Review: The Blissful “Botched-Night Splendor” of Tram 83

October 2, 2015
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Tram 83 mirrors the most sordid and chaotic features of contemporary African cities, in which non-Africans also remain intimately and often deviously involved.

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Book Review: Dystopia as Our Future — Antoine Volodine’s “Post-Exotic” Oeuvre

September 8, 2015
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Antoine Volodine is a master of the prolonged, very prolonged, tongue-in-cheek spoof. But he is also dead serious.

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