Book Reviews
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July 29, 2020 |
What defines a moment, a movement? The cause or the people who defend it? Too often both are overshadowed by chaos, destruction, and misdirection. John Willis’s Mni Wiconi / Water Is Lif... -
July 2, 2020 |
Photo by Ben Hershey / Unsplash John Feinstein, when he wrote The Back Roads to March: The Unsung, Unheralded, and Unknown Heroes of a College Basketball Season (Doubleday, 2020), pro... -
June 30, 2020 |
Photo by John Fisher Manoomin. It is the first Ojibwe word I will learn. It means wild rice, or “food that grows on water.” The sound of it is fitting. Less sibilant than rice... -
June 22, 2020 |
Yu Miri / Courtesy of Zoom Japan Yu Miri first started researching the evictions of the homeless community in Tokyo’s Ueno Park back in 2006. Days or even hours before visits by the emperor an... -
June 3, 2020 |
Naoise Dolan probably wishes her debut novel, Exciting Times (Ecco, 2020), wasn’t so relevant. Although the book isn’t set during a global pandemic, it does include the many unsavory aspects... -
May 6, 2020 |
Neva Lukić / Courtesy of Cultural Institution Blesok The recent collection of short stories by Neva Lukić, Endless Endings (Bokeh, 2018), originally written in Croatian and translated... -
April 23, 2020 |
Left: Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal in Normal People (2020) / Courtesy of IMDB Sally Rooney’s 2018 novel is a meticulous observation, or even a study, of how one human being c... -
April 21, 2020 |
The author at the Zakir Hussain Delhi College during the Bengali Literary Festival 2018 / Photo courtesy of bitanchakraborty.com Simplicity and quiet elegance never fail to impress us. The eff... -
April 9, 2020 |
Mildred D. Taylor at the University of Oklahoma, October 24, 2003 / Photo by Robert Taylor Generations of American schoolchildren have grown up with Cassie Logan and her brothers, Stacey, Chri... -
March 10, 2020 |
The Aunt Who Wouldn’t Die (John Murray, 2019), by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, translated from the original Bangla by Arunava Sinha, is a fast-paced thriller about the rescue mission around the... -
March 5, 2020 |
Lafcadio Hearn in 1889 / Photo by Frederick Gutekunst Born in Greece in the mid-nineteenth century, Lafcadio Hearn shuffled between Ireland, the West Indies, and a few cities in America before... -
February 11, 2020 |
The introductory notes to Quesadilla and Other Adventures (Hawakal Publishers, 2019), edited by Somrita Urni Ganguly, lay the ground plan for the anthology. “Food is history,” writes Ganguly.... -
February 3, 2020 |
On the cover of his latest book of prose poems, Suturas do Amor (Editorial Autor, 2019), Mozambican author Rudêncio Morais announces that he is a poeta falso or “false poet... -
January 30, 2020 |
India’s Paul Zacharia, after five decades perfecting the art of the short story in the Malayalam language, spoken in the state of Kerala, has published his first novel, A Secret History of Compas... -
January 27, 2020 |
Jurij Koch / Courtesy of Domowina-Verlag In the 1950s, a girl whom Jurij Koch knew in high school moved away from their hometown of Cottbus in East Germany. It was a case, he says in his recen... -
January 22, 2020 |
Photo by Michael Gaida / Pixabay “Health is whatever works and for as long.” This phrase, a quote from a poem by Dr. John Stone (poet-cardiologist), was announced to our literature and medicin... -
January 16, 2020 |
How is Judith Summerfield’s account of the stories she heard from her father meaningful to us, since we each have a story to tell about our own life? In the twelve chapters of A Man Comes from Som... -
January 14, 2020 |
Karl Schlögel has a profound, even intuitive understanding of Russian domestic and foreign politics. His view reaches both far into the past and projects likely future developments. He recognizes that... -
December 5, 2019 |
Shalev photo (left)– Das blaue Sofa / Club Bertelsmann The pain has returned—in Zeruya Shalev’s latest novel, Pain (Other Press, 2019)—“like labor pains, [its waves] come every minute... -
November 5, 2019 |
My association with the work of Józef Wittlin started when Professor Anna Frajlich invited me to write a paper about Wittlin’s association with France for her 1996 Józef Wittlin conference at Columbi... -
October 28, 2019 |
Many poets, writers, and thinkers have dwelled on the meaning of poetry following great tragedy, with Theodor Adorno’s claim that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (“Cultural Criticism an... -
October 23, 2019 |
Georg Rafisch, “headless,” 2015 / Flickr When I lived in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome, I made a point of stopping in San Francesco a Ripa whenever I was running errands. The church hous... -
August 21, 2019 |
Readers of Natalia Ginzburg’s masterful autobiographical novel Family Lexicon (1963; Eng. 2017) will welcome New Directions’ 2019 reissues of her novels The Dry Heart (1947; Eng. 19... -
August 20, 2019 |
Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200 CE), “How to Read” 論語集注, in Sishu jizhu 四書集注, Sibu beiyao edition (National University of Singapore) In A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter (Princ... -
August 12, 2019 |
Photo by Shevaun Williams A well-traveled road in our collective consciousness is the question of what it means to be human. Joy Harjo is a master of this examination and delves through layers...
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Translator’s note: On July 16, 2020, the Cuban government announced a set of economic reforms that includes the...
What defines a moment, a movement? The cause or the people who defend it? Too often both are overshadowed by chaos, destruction, and misdirection....
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From the Family Album
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Judging an English Olympiad in Kyrgyzstan, the author witnesses her native tongue “being...
