Book Reviews
Saša Stanišić‘s “How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone”
"What's going to happen is so improbable that there'll be no improbability left for a made-up story." So thinks Aleksandar Krsmanović on April 6, 1992, the day the war forces ...
Pierre Martory’s “Landscapist”
From swans with amputated purple wings, to a gnome with a hairlip, to a tired unicorn dreaming "of yelling schoolboys, Plato badly digested," Pierre Martory's collection The ...
Arkady Babchenko’s “One Soldier’s War”
For Arkady Babchenko, there is no way out. Drafted in 1995 to fight in the first Chechen war, he re-upped in 1999 to fight in the second one. There would never be any life again but the war. ...
Per Petterson’s “To Siberia”
In 2007 Per Petterson had his second publication in the United States: a short, unostentatious, and penetrating novel entitled Out Stealing Horses. It was a surprising commercial and critical ...
Alaa Al Aswany’s “Chicago”
Since the publication of his successful debut The Yacoubian Building (2004), Alaa Al Aswany has become one of Egypt's most celebrated writers, a vocal opponent to the corruption and nepotism ...
Rubem Fonseca’s “The Taker and Other Stories”
In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky writes, "Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not ...
Suzane Adam’s “Laundry”
The story begins in a swirl: "For two days I've been running around, trying to understand, put things together, find some clarity, explain. Not lose my mind. This isn't the time to ...
Edgardo Rodriguez Julia’s “San Juan: Memoir of a City”
Cities impose their will upon us, and what we say about them has as much to do with "the regimen cities keep over imagination"* as it does with us. The city that swallows the writer is ...
Peter Stamm’s “On a Day Like This”
When Andreas, the narrator of Peter Stamm's On a Day Like This, first arrives in Paris from Switzerland to teach school, he sees Chet Baker play. "He sat slumped on a barstool with his ...
S. Yizhar’s “Khirbet Khizeh”
Long considered a classic, Khirbet Khizeh—also spelled Hirbet Hizeh (Arabic: The Ruins of Hizeh)—was first published in Israel in 1949, some months after the end of the 1948–49 ...
Stefan Zweig’s “The Post-Office Girl”
Cultural critic Clive James has called Stefan Zweig "the incarnation of humanism," and a fairer and more apt four-word assessment of the late Austrian writer and his work could not be ...
Ferenc Karinthy’s “Metropole”
To write of Ferenc Karinthy's Metropole is to emphasize, as Nietzsche reminds us, that we need history, "but not the way a spoiled loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it." ...
Ana Maria Shua’s “Quick Fix”
Flash fiction, sudden fiction, short short fiction—the high school students I've taught prefer the term "nanofiction" for this genre because of the connection with their ...
Rabih Alameddine’s “The Hakawati”
Rabih Alameddine has spun a honeycomb of fable, family history, and Lebanese lore in his newest novel, The Hakawati. I was struck initially by the book's title, the Arabic word for ...
Carlo Lucarelli’s “Via delle Oche”
If more historical crime fiction were like Carlo Lucarelli's De Luca trilogy, I'd probably read more of it than I do now. What makes Lucarelli's brand different? For one thing, the ...
Elena Ferrante’s “The Lost Daughter”
"The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can't understand." With that simple and unnerving sentence on the second page of this astonishingly economic novel, ...
Lars Saabye Christensen’s “The Model”
"Model Kits" "Historians who constantly present their Scotland Yard credentials," T. J. Clark writes, "never fail to miss what the real crime was."* In The Model, ...
Yoko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
To watch someone undetected, to observe them from afar, to steal a glance without getting caught—these are powerful pleasures. But it's also a high-stakes game, for there is always the ...
Jenny Erpenbeck’s “The Old Child & Other Stories” and “The Book of Words”
Addition by Subtraction In Jenny Erpenbeck's fiction, girls are tabula rasa to be instructed step by step by teachers and fathers (state substitutes) to be handmaidens. They are empty ...
Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s “Missing Soluch”
Published during revolutionary times in Iran in 1979, Missing Soluch is a 500-page tribute to the socialist ideas that so enthused the Iranian intellectuals and writers of that period. Mahmoud ...
S. Y. Agnon’s “To This Day”
"During the Great War, I lived in the west of Berlin, in a room with a balcony in a small boarding house on Fasanenstrasse." So begins To This Day, Agnon's shortest novel, first ...
Antonio Muñoz Molina’s “In Her Absence”
At the beginning of Antonio Muñoz Molina's In Her Absence, Mario Lopez, a provincial bureaucrat in 1980's Spain, returns home from work to receive a passionate kiss from the ...
Sandor Marai’s “The Rebels”
The Last Waltz It is 1918 in Eastern Europe. In March, the Brest-Litvosk Treaty has been signed by the Soviet Union and the Central Powers, but war continues on the Western front. In May, ...
Andrey Platonov’s “Soul”
Andrey Platonov brings out grand claims in others. Most excellent writers do this, but Platonov perhaps belongs in a special league. His chief translator Robert Chandler, in the introduction to ...
Mario Vargas Llosa’s “The Bad Girl”
Mario Vargas Llosa's engaging novel The Bad Girl is not only a story of thwarted love, it reveals a haunted swath of the third world diaspora. Its characters are cast about the globe like ...
Pascal Mercier’s “Night Train to Lisbon”
Lisbon Calling We speak about the book that changed our life, the encounter that sent us down a path, the person who turned us around. It is at such moments we say we become who we are, and we ...
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