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Category: From the Archive
by Susan Harris, April 25, 2012
If you've finished the issue and are still in the mood, check out Empar Moliner's rollicking "Invention of the Aspirin" in our October 2007 Catalan issue. A bored wife finds she has the ability to slip into other women's identities—and their bedrooms. Shapeshifting from secretary to…
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Category: Dispatches
by Susan Harris, September 7, 2010
If you're reveling in this month's Urdu issue, do check out Saadat Hasan Manto's 1955 classic "Toba Tek Singh" from September 2003. Just after Partition, the governments of Pakistan and India decide to exchange lunatics: "Muslim lunatics in Indian madhouses would be sent to Pakistan, while…
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Category: Dispatches
by Susan Harris, August 31, 2010
As the Northern Hemisphere's summer crawls to a close, we recommend Yasmina Khadra's "Absence." In an Algerian resort town at the end of the season, shy, dreamy teen Nasser waves good-bye to the departing Noria, the object of his mute yearning. Wandering the deserted streets, Nasser imagines…
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Category: Dispatches
by Susan Harris, August 24, 2010
In this Summer of Stieg Larsson, we challenge Sweden's claim to the Nordic crime crown with a chilling Finnish story from our issue of June 2007. In this extract from one of Matti Yrjänä Joensuu's Detective Harjunpää novels, a criminal with the deceptively mild name…
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Category: Dispatches
by Susan Harris, August 17, 2010
Since the entire world is on vacation, anticipating vacation, or just back from vacation, we recommend "Agony in the Kitchen," from our issue of September 2003. Juan José Millás depicts a fretful man who installs his family in a beautiful seaside house but can't take a holiday from…
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Category: Dispatches
by Susan Harris, August 11, 2010
If this month's wealth of Hungarian writing leaves you wanting more, look no further than our May 2008 issue. György Dragomán's "Haul" describes a human smuggler named Zeus and his less than Olympian methods. In an unspecified year, he drives his desperate clients to an unnamed…
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Category: Dispatches
by Susan Harris, August 3, 2010
Fidel Castro has announced the publication of The Strategic Victory, the first volume of his memoirs. (The second volume: The Final Strategic Counteroffensive.) For a possibly more accurate perspective, check out these extracts from Norberto Fuentes's Autobiography of Fidel Castro: chapter…
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Category: Dispatches
by Susan Harris, July 28, 2010
Jean-Philippe Toussaint's Self-Portrait Abroad collects the Belgian writer's impressions of his travels to destinations as diverse as Kyoto, Berlin, Hanoi, and Prague. The extract published in our issue of April 2006, "Cap Corse (The Best Day of My Life)," describes an afternoon on Corsica that…
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Category: Dispatches
by Susan Harris, July 20, 2010
Ana María Shua's Rematch, from our August 2005 issue, goes twelve rounds with the story of Argentine boxer Carlos Monzón, the World Champion Middleweight from 1970 to 1977. Our narrator, a grizzled old fan, recounts how he engineered Monzón's brilliant career and violent…
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Category: From the Archive
by Susan Harris, July 14, 2010
If the end of the World Cup has left you, in the words of Mexico's Álvaro Enrigue, "socceristically disoriented," we prescribe Enrigue's elegiac "Readymade" from our June 2006 issue. This memoir of Mexico's hapless Club de Fútbol Pachuca and its Alfonso "the Fool" Madrigal entwines…
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Category: Dispatches
by Susan Harris, June 17, 2010
First published in our December 2007 Departures issue, Gaute Heivoll's "Dr. Gordeau" follows a Norwegian man on an ominous trip to an unnamed country in search of a sex change. Seeking the elusive surgeon of the title, Anders moves numbly between the sinister clinic, the roiling market, and…
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