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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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Book Review: Two From Andreï Makine — A Matter of Trust

September 8, 2015
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Makine may be plagiarizing himself, which is a perfectly legitimate thing for a writer to do, but scenes of spring snow and railroad stations become clichés even in talented hands.

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Book Review: An Exhilarating Poetry Trek Through Europe

August 31, 2015
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John Taylor introduces readers to an amazing array of sensibilities and life histories in a babel of languages from an atlas of nations.

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Book Review: Blaise Cendrars’ Brilliant WW I Memoir — Surviving the “Shambles” of War

August 28, 2015
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The Bloody Hand stands alongside other autobiographical classics devoted to the First World War.

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Book Review: “Imperium” — A Shock-Packed Pastiche of History

August 10, 2015
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In this entertaining satire of empire, Christian Kracht makes use of a nihilistic magic realism, without the sweetness one normally associates with that mode.

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Book Review: Anne Garréta’s “Sphinx” — A Compelling Story of Genderless Love

July 15, 2015
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Garréta pulls off a stylistic feat: it is impossible to determine the gender of the two main characters.

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Book Review: “Look Who’s Back” — The Second Coming

July 1, 2015
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The writing in this novel depends on winks and nods. You’re invited to be in on a big joke, assuming it is one.

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Poetry Review: Restoring the “Old Questions” — Klaus Merz’s “Out of the Dust”

June 16, 2015
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Poet Klaus Merz wields his deceptively simple diction in order to pry open hidden secrets: what we leave unsaid, what we neglect, avoid.

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Book Review: “The Book of Beginnings” — Vive les indifférences!

June 8, 2015
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This study is an attempt to “enter” a foreign way of thought and to study the “possibilities” and, by extension, “potential mindsets” of the human mind.

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