Book Reviews
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June 28, 2017 |
Mathias Énard / Photo © Marc Melki / Courtesy of New Directions The quickest way to turn someone off from the possibility of reading Mathias Énard’s astounding novel, Compass (New Direction... -
June 7, 2017 |
Biljana Obradović captures the immigrant’s distrust of the permanent in Incognito. Serbian American poet Biljana Obradović has lived in Yugoslavia, Greece, India, and in the US, wh... -
May 31, 2017 |
Tanure Ojaide / Urhobo Historical Society Tanure Ojaide seamlessly blends the personal with the political in this volume of verse to paint a compelling portrait of a Nigeria always in transition... -
May 24, 2017 |
Poet John Kinsella inhabits and lends voice to the landscapes around him in Firebreaks. In Firebreaks (Norton, 2016), the title John Kinsella chooses for his twenty-third... -
May 17, 2017 |
Samrat Upadhyay’s newest story collection offers political engagement shot through with humanism and hints of spirituality. Political unrest looms as large in Samrat Upadhyay’s newest colle... -
May 5, 2017 |
Cardoso’s magnum opus offers a glimpse into the hidden world of postwar Brazil’s upper echelon. Editor’s note: When a publisher brings forth a much-needed translation of a classic... -
May 3, 2017 |
Laurens explores the seductive danger of a digital fountain of youth in this novel about women’s identity and agency in midlife. Technology and gender standards collide in Camille Laurens’s... -
April 19, 2017 |
Hungarian-born author Magda Szabó lays bare the dangers of settling too deeply into routine as a daughter helps her mother navigate life as a widow. New York Review Books is almost... -
April 6, 2017 |
Anecdotes often shed light on the way we see art and literature. A few weeks ago, I was skimming through Rachel Corbett’s book in the Paris metro when a young man came toward me and asked me whether... -
March 20, 2017 |
It is not easy to be a poet; certainly not when you live away from the language in which you feel, see, and analyze everything around you. Emigration isn’t easy for poets, who live to seize the world... -
March 8, 2017 |
The author of Between Day and Night (TCU Press, 2013), poet Miguel González-Gerth, now ninety, has written in traditional forms and in free verse. While his strong formal poems never fall he... -
February 15, 2017 |
Doron Rabinovici. Photograph © Marko Lipuš Doron Rabinovici’s novel Elsewhere, in German titled Andernorts, was shortlisted for the prestigious German Book Prize 2010, but it is on... -
November 16, 2016 |
“When I read a necessary poem (which is different from just a good poem), it shakes me, even changes me a little, and deepens my understanding of the world,” Zeina Hashem Beck, Lebanese poet, said in... -
November 14, 2016 |
In Oer Atlantyske djipten (Friese Pers Boekerij, 2014), the latest novel by the distinguished Frieslandic writer Durk van der Ploeg, loyal readers will recognize at once the familiar touches... -
October 5, 2016 |
Daniel Black’s fifth novel, The Coming (St. Martin’s Press, 2015),is a nod to Toni Morrison’s suggestion that stories about the Middle Passage did not seep into the African American oral tra... -
August 1, 2016 |
Bhisham Bherwani grew up in Bombay/Mumbai, where he still has family and visits frequently. As a poet, though, he was born and educated in the United States, where he relocated as a student more than... -
July 18, 2016 |
Ever since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014, a deluge of Patrick Modiano’s work has found its way into English translation. Modiano’s novels have averaged at least two or three pu... -
April 13, 2016 |
Like most immigrant kids, John Guzlowski never wanted to write about his Polish parents and the world they left when they came to America. They had been slave laborers during World War II, while he,... -
March 9, 2016 |
Evgeni Zotov, “Different Ways,” Aleppo, November 14, 2010 In her first novel, Amal (“Hope” in Arabic, published by Nūn Press in 2014), the young Syrian novelist Dina Nisrini takes an origin... -
March 2, 2016 |
Under the repressive regime of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, any work that even hinted at criticism of the state would result in severe punishment for the offending culprit. How Capti... -
September 16, 2015 |
Drew Wilson, “End of Amnesia,” 2009 1. Kazuo Ishiguro’s long-awaited The Buried Giant (2015), his first novel in ten years, is set in a mythologized fifth-century Britain in which pixies, d... -
August 26, 2015 |
From Grimm’s Fairy Tales, translated from the German by Margaret Hunt, illustrated by John B. Gruelle (Cupples & Leon, 1914). A review of The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the B... -
March 25, 2015 |
Shortly after my mother died, while napping near an open window of my apartment on Avenue Foch, I felt—or thought I felt—a hand touch mine. It was warm, large, and familiar. Then I heard my mother’s... -
December 5, 2014 |
Photo by Zeynel Abidin Turkish writer Elif Shafak conquers the task of crossing both cultures and genders in her latest novel, The Architect’s Apprentice (London: Viking, 2014), in which sh... -
December 15, 2014 |
A Review of Ancestral Intelligence, by Vera Schwarcz (Atrium House, 2013) Photo by Eki Ramadhan 1 Where thought could not be free,Death was a mor...
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Mathias Énard’s Compass (New Directions, 2017) is not only a love letter to the field of orientalism but, more broadly, to the power of the...
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