Book Reviews
Darina Al-Joundi and Mohammed Kacimi’s “The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing
All the more startling, then, to read "The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing," a sizzling, beautiful, and maddening memoir
Modern Poetry of Pakistan
For a country often drawn in newspapers as the backdrop of mosque and market bombings, troubled politics, and underdevelopment, poetry seems to waft through every aspect of Pakistani life.
Kotaro Isaka’s “Remote Control
But for Isaka and his protagonists there is no way home, and no escape from this world and its global order.
Andrzej Sosnowski’s “Lodgings”
When asked how he responds to the weight of certain preconceptions about Polish poetry, Sosnowksi´s answer is simple: “I’m not sure that I do.”
The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda
Rodoreda’s characters struggle with the crushing realities of life—airless marriages, the shrinking of dreams and horizons brought on by war and poverty, illness and grief, separations and departures.
Dezsö Kosztolányi’s “Kornel Esti: A Novel”
Esti is not a classic, Gothic doppelganger, not Jekyll to the narrator's Hyde, but more of a magician who can seem to lift a house by playing a magic flute.
Margarita Karapanou’s “The Sleepwalker”
Part dystopia part satire, this surreal tale of lost souls, and a dethroned deity, is not so much a murder mystery as it is a murderer's mystery
Belen Gopegui’s “The Scale of Maps”
“Trembling” is how protagonist Sergio Prim first appears to the reader. “His hands fluttered like a bashful magician’s,” the Spaniard Belen Gopegui writes of her fictional creation.
Nathacha Appanah’s “The Last Brother”
The Last Brother, by young French-Mauritian author Nathacha Appanah, is a quiet, lyrical coming-of-age novel set against one of the least-known chapters of World War II
Jenny Erpenbeck’s “Visitation”
Like the storied estates of Brideshead and Manderley, the house in Jenny Erpenbeck’s unsettling, inventive novel Visitation has a hold on everyone who passes through it.
Atiq Rahimi’s “A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear”
To traverse the fractured mind of Farhad, the protagonist and narrator of Atiq Rahimi’s latest novel, is to glimpse the broken soul of a battered and confused country.
Mathias Énard’s “Zone”
The novel is billed as a modern-day Iliad and has the same number of chapters as the Iliad has books.
Manoel de Barros’s “Birds for a Demolition”
Barros's poems are all at once small bestiaries and collections of aphorisms
Aharon Shabtai’s “War & Love, Love & War”
Aharon Shabtai’s new poetry collection War & Love, Love & War is, as its title suggests, a book full of reversals and inversions.
Emilio Lascano Tegui’s “On Elegance While Sleeping
Tristan Garcia’s “Hate: A Romance”
Elizabeth believes in pills, has been called “pretty” enough to believe it, is a self-professed bitch, and has terrible taste in men.
Ranko Marinkovic’s “Cyclops”
Orly Castel-Bloom’s “Dolly City”
Mahmoud Darwish’s “Journal of an Ordinary Grief”
Every artist, particularly if they happen to be a good one, is in a sense posthumous
Buddhadeva Bose’s “My Kind of Girl”
A brief encounter with a young couple in love inspires the men to pass the time by telling stories of love from their own lives.
Ingrid Winterbach’s “To Hell with Cronje”
If two books can be said to constitute a trend (or even the whiff of a trend) then we might just be in the midst of something of an Afrikaans literary boom.
Jerzy Pilch’s “A Thousand Peaceful Cities”
The acclaimed satirist and newspaper columnist Jerzy Pilch once again weaves fact and fiction in a memorable absurdist tale of flawed political resistance.
Mela Hartwig’s “Am I a Redundant Human Being?”
It is as if the narrator takes her own self, puts it under a microscope and probes it without flinching.
Camilla Ceder’s “Frozen Moment”
On a bleak winter day in 2006 a body is found, shot execution-style and crushed by a car.
Taslima Nasrin’s “Revenge”
A stalwart advocate for freedom of speech, Taslima Nasrin is an exiled political and artistic refugee who has had her share of literary revenge.
Per Petterson’s “I Curse the River of Time”
Newly diagnosed with stomach cancer, Arvid’s mother has left Norway for her hometown in Denmark, and Arvid, burdened with a host of ailments of his own, has followed her, his intentions unclear
Jean-Christophe Valtat’s “03”
A lyric from The Smiths sums up the narrator’s attitude toward feelings: “And if the day came when I felt a natural emotion/ I’d get such a shock I’d probably lie/ in the middle of the street and die”
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.
Patrick Ourednik’s “Case Closed”
What do you think is the biggest-selling Czech book of all time? Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being? The Good Soldier Svejk, by Jaroslav Hasek? Something by Havel, Hrabal, Klima, or Skvorecky?
Alex Epstein’s “Blue Has No South”
Epstein’s collection is something of a spatial triumph—microscopic stories (some are only single sentences long) with manifold compartments and a capaciousness belied by their slight appearance.
Quim Monzo’s “Gasoline”
Quim Monzó's Gasoline is a novel as an existential question: What happens when the idea of postmodernism becomes tangible reality?
Linda Ferri’s “Cecilia”
Cecilia, Linda Ferri’s latest novel, retells the myth of Saint Cecilia, the Roman nobleman’s daughter who would become the patron saint of music and a Christian martyr
Alain Mabanckou’s “Broken Glass”
Alain Mabanckou, the young Congolese author of African Pyscho, seems intent on subverting all the clichés about African writing
Durs Grünbein’s The Bars of Atlantis
Despite its brief history, East Germany held potent sway over the Western imagination
Olga Tokarczuk’s “Primeval and Other Times”
Then there is Primeval: protozoic, foundational, “the place at the centre of the universe.”
Romain Gary’s “Hocus Bogus”
In the 1970s the French writer and film director Romain Gary had grown, in his own words, “tired of being nothing but myself.”
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