The connection that a reader forges with a first-person narrator varies tremendously from book to book, depending on the degree of intimacy or detachment elicited, on how convincing or charming or grating we find the voice, on how seduced, manipulated, or outraged we find ourselves. Sometimes, all too…...read more »

If there’s a Günter Grass reader on your Christmas list, you’ve probably already thought about giving him or her a copy of The Box: Tales from the Darkroom, the quasi-novel quasi-memoir that came out last month from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in a translation by Krishna Winston. The Boxis…...read more »

Ever since Last Evenings on Earth was released in paperback, I have developed the habit, which has become a mission, of reading each Bolaño book as it appears in English translation. There have been nine since then, and two were pretty large. Now that they’ve been consumed, and the two flashy…...read more »

In his excellent new book, Hispanic New York, Columbia University’s Claudio Remeseira stays within the five boroughs and yet has achieved something decidedly, and admirably, far-flung. I think of the volume as a biography of New York, a portrait of the city – past, present, and future –…...read more »