197 entries in Mag: Book Reviews
Adania Shibli’s “We Are All Equally Far from Love”
With the publication of her debut novel, Touch (translated from the Arabic by Paula Haydar)—told from the point of view of a little girl living at the time of the Sabra and Shatila massacre—Palestinian…...
Abdellah Taia’s “An Arab Melancholia”
Abdellah Taïa is Morocco’s highest profile gay writer, a point underscored in the accompanying blurb to his recently translated An Arab Melancholia. Since the book is billed as an autobiographical…...
Etgar Keret’s “Suddenly, a Knock on the Door”
If a man comes knocking at your door to steal your magic goldfish, what do you do? Do you a.) politely ask him to leave; b.) assault him with the nearest metal object at hand; or c.) ask the goldfish to…...
Andrey Kurkov’s “The General’s Thumb”
A retired general is found dead in central Kiev—hanged, apparently, from a giant Coca-Cola advertising balloon. Stranger still, orders from the Ministry request that Lieutenant Viktor Slutsky, a…...
Osamu Dazai’s “Schoolgirl”
Written in 1939 but only now translated into English for the first time, Osamu Dazai’s Schoolgirl—a slim, precocious novella narrated by a schoolgirl of indeterminate age—was stylish…...
Jan Phillip Sendker’s “The Art of Hearing Heartbeats”
This debut novel, originally published in 2002 as Das Herzenhören in Jan-Philipp Sendker’s native Germany, went on to become a national bestseller, and it’s easy to see why. Sendker tells…...
Friedrich Christian Delius’s “Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman”
Crafted by one of Germany’s most acclaimed contemporary novelists, Portrait of the Mother As a Young Woman is a single-sentence long, and its 100-odd pages chart a young German woman’s inner…...
César Aira’s “Varamo”
One finds rhythms while walking down the stairs, poems strewn in the middle of the street. — Oliverio Girondo Can literature be composed by chance, rather than design? Where does one draw the line…...
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s “The Letter Killers Club”
“As per Article 5 of the Regulations, this manuscript is committed to death.” The chairman of the Letter Killers Club throws the contraband notebook onto the flames as the other members watch…...
Admiel Kosman’s “Approaching You in English”
I can write poems that bang. Loud. Like the shutters. With a vengeance. Poems made of rain. And poems for the poor made of tin. * Leave me everything, beautiful. Fasten everything…...
Alexandra Chreiteh’s “Always Coca-Cola”
In the opening section of Always Coca-Cola, the savage and heady debut from young Lebanese novelist Alexandra Chreiteh, our narrator Abeer is flipping through a women’s magazine when an article extolling…...
Dubravka Ugresic’s “Karaoke Culture”
Karaoke means “hollow orchestra” in Japanese. You fill the void—drunk or sober, on-key or off. Part of the allure is for the amateur to wrest the microphone away from the stars and, for…...
Tomás Eloy Martínez’s “Purgatory”
On a certain level, Purgatory is a metaphorical ghost story—a meditation on loss, invisibility, and vanishing. But this being Tomas Eloy Martínez, the author of Santa Evita, The Perón…...
Abdourahman Waberi’s “Passage of Tears”
The young French-Djiboutian author Abdourahman A. Waberi is one of the more inventive of a new wave of African writers, and is also unique in the range of his influences. His work manages to reference…...
Jose Donoso’s “The Lizard’s Tale”
“One life kills another, one death revives another,” writes the Chilean author José Donoso near the end of The Lizard’s Tale. This unfinished novel was itself revived when the…...
Zoran Drvenkar’s “Sorry”
Rare is the thriller that surpasses the limits of genre fiction. But Zoran Drvenkar’s Sorry is one such book: a thriller on its face, but also a thoughtful study in guilt and innocence, violence…...
Anja Utler’s “engulf – enkindle”
you speak of waste heaps, of scree of: implanting, the windrose * glottis rustling almost trembling i hear you again: say song you say song – what is: song Mired as we are in the throes of a new…...
Juan Pablo Villalobos’s “Down the Rabbit Hole”
Juan Pablo Vilallobos’s debut novel is a smart variation on the recent vogue for Latin American “narcoliterature”; Down the Rabbit Hole is told from the point of view not of a gangster,…...
Meir Shalev’s “My Russian Grandmother and her American Vacuum Cleaner”
Back in the 1920s, Sigmund Freud was presenting his theories on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder—“unquestionably the most interesting” area of analytic research, in his opinion—little…...
Eduardo Chirinos’s “Reasons for Writing Poetry”
I don’t know what to sing. I am the others. I hope the others are me. Like the trees. I don’t know what to sing, no nightingales on my finger. * It has taken centuries to say ‘orange…...
