August 2008: Writings on Psychiatry

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Interviews by Kellan Cummings

An Interview with Péter Esterházy

Péter Esterházy is one of Hungary's foremost contemporary novelists, having won literary distinctions both at home and abroad. A number of his works, including Helping Verbs of the Heart,…

Translated from Hungarian by Judith Sollosy

Nonfiction by

A Translator’s Ball Game with a Postmodern Author

In Judith Sollosy, the "untranslatable" Esterházy meets his match He willy-nilly created a brand of intertextual irony.

Poetry by Miroslav Kirin

My Tongue Falls out of My Mouth

my tongue falls out of my mouth it is no longer a tongue, it is a huge calf's liver of the calf we slaughtered yesterday assures me the butcher of my favorite butcher shop but I didn't go to the…

Translated from Croatian by Miroslav Kirin

Nonfiction by Eric Abrahamsen

Broken

Ma Jian, the dissident Chinese author living in London, recently attended a talk by another Chinese author who raised his ire. Writing in the Times on the nineteenth anniversary of Tiananmen, Ma Jian described…

Book Reviews

Carlo Lucarelli’s “Via delle Oche”

Reviewed by Peter Rozovsky

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 De Luca…...

Elena Ferrante’s “The Lost Daughter”

Reviewed by Joseph V. Tirella

"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, author Elena Ferrante…...

Fiction by Klas Östergren

A Weeknight Before the Turn of the Century

It was a rainy autumn night in Stockholm, a night in the middle of the week. Feeling a need to further specify the moment in time, I probably would have added: "a weeknight just before the turn of the…

Translated from Swedish by Tiina Nunnally

Fiction by Ana María Shua

A Dog’s Life

Translator's Note: When I asked Ani Shua to tell me what motivated her to write this odd little story, she immediately provided the following background information about the legend of the werewolf—or…

Translated from Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger

Fiction by Kanji Hanawa

Compos Mentis

When I first met Mr. Masaomi Chikamatsu in the town of Y, I must say he was not exactly friendly toward me. True, I was just a writer on the lookout for a story. I interview many people in the course of…

Translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Fiction by Jocelyn Dupré

The Black Marne

When she hugged me from behind and put her cold hands on my chest, my own hand holding the razor twitched. I'd thought she was at her parents', but in her haste to see me she had bolted out to…

Translated from French by Paul Curtis Daw

Fiction by Alfred Döblin

The Dancer and Her Body

At eleven, it was decided that she would become a dancer. With her peculiar disposition and a flair for grimacing and contorting her limbs, she seemed well suited to this profession. Previously careless…

Translated from German by Rosamund Looney

Nonfiction by Goli Taraghi

The First Day

Author's note: I left Iran in 1979, the year of the Islamic Revolution, and settled in Paris with my two small children. I was naïve enough to think that the chaotic upheaval of the beginning…

Translated from Farsi

Fiction by Duna Ghali

The Psychiatrist

My new position gave me contact with refugees from various communities in Copenhagen. Three municipalities had engaged me to study the cases of ordinary patients or ones whose health conditions were hard…

Translated from Arabic by William Maynard Hutchins

Fiction by Francisco Proaño Arandi

Beings with Cruel Faces

"I can't stop thinking about them, Doctor," I said. I was prey to a strange tension, tossing and turning on the very lightweight couch, sensing the presence of my counterpart, my listener, inside of…

Translated from Spanish by Harry Morales

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