Book Reviews

Mauricio Segura’s “Black Alley”

Good things rarely happen in alleys. They are the sites of illicit exchange—of violence and unsavory trafficking.


Alejandro Zambra’s “The Private Lives of Trees”

In 2007’s The Private Lives of Trees, Zambra returns to the intersection of art, life and the botanical


Agop J. Hacikyan and Jean-Yves Soucy’s “A Summer Without Dawn”

This sweeping work of historical fiction begins in moral anguish. The novel’s protagonist, Vartan Balian, cannot decide whether to flee with his family on the eve of the 1915 Armenian Genocide.


July 2010

The Penalty

Everyone around him was screaming. Terrified, he wondered what the uproar was about.


Drawings on a Soccer Ball

the last name of the player on the german team translates into russian as pig crawling up a blond graceful creature


from “The Revenge of Capablanca”

The match was held in an arena, semicircular in shape, behind the town hall.


Walking the Keihin Factory Belt with Stuart Dybek

As usual, the boy missed the fly ball that anyone else would have caught with his eyes closed, and it rolled into a thicket of reeds by the river.


from “The All-Rounder”

At about three Farwick leaves the office building at one end of the market place. Just outside the door he stops. Is it warm or isn’t it?


Dummy Run

He liked his supper at six. To come home from the office, briefly look at the newspaper and then find his meal on the table, that was the way he liked it.


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