World Books
By Bill Marx Translator Ellen Elias-Bursac On this week’s World Books podcast I talk to Ellen Elias-Bursac, who translates the work of two of my favorite writers from the former Yugoslavia: David Albahari and Dubravka Ugresic. Elias-Bursac is currently living in the Netherlands, but she recently visited Boston, so I got a chance to talk…
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 World Books podcast #13 I talk to Angolan writer José Agualusa, who has garnered considerable praise in the Portuguese-speaking world, including comparisons to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. José Eduardo Agualusa at the Brooklyn Book Fair with Dedi Felman, his American editor, behind him. He has had three novels translated into English, each…
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 MorePorochista Khakpour at the Brooklyn Book Fair. The late David Foster Wallace was her hero. By Bill Marx The latest World Books podcast features my conversation at the Brooklyn Book Fair with Iranian-American author Porochista Khakpour, whose first novel, “Sons and Other Flammable Objects,” earned accolades from “The New Yorker” as well as the “New…
Read MoreBreyten Breytenbach at this year’s Brooklyn Book Fair By Bill Marx On this week’s World Books podcast I talk to South African writer, painter, and human rights activist Breyten Breytenbach about his recently published book of mordantly fantastic fables “All One Horse.” In America, Breytenbach is known, if at all, for his four highly unconventional…
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 MoreAnother neglected master from New Zealand — writer C.K. Stead by Bill Marx I just noticed that a week before Janet Frame’s previously unpublished story “Gorse is not People” appeared in “The New Yorker” the magazine published a poem by another fine New Zealand author, C.K. Stead. He not only knew Frame at the time…
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…
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