Book Reviews
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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... -
July 24, 2019 |
Amit Chaudhuri. Photo by Geoff Pugh. Amit Chaudhuri’s seventh novel, Friend of My Youth (New York Review Books, 2019), follows a version of the author in the years prior to the book’s... -
July 18, 2019 |
Photo by Ethan Chiang / Flickr Contemporary Taiwanese Women Writers: An Anthology (Cambria Press, 2018) is a collection of short stories in translation featuring contemporary Taiwan... -
July 3, 2019 |
Ever since early Islam, Jews have been dubbed the people of the book. The title stuck in European lands too, a deferential nod to the role of the Hebrew Bible in the Western canon, the breadth of Jew... -
June 27, 2019 |
Shadab Zeest Hashmi’s Ghazal Cosmopolitan: The Culture and Craft of the Ghazal (Jacar Press, 2017), a melding of personal and craft essays, qasidas, and, of course, ghazals, functions as a k... -
June 13, 2019 |
Dany Laferrière was elected to the French Academy in 2013. Edwidge Danticat won the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2018 and is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant.... -
June 4, 2019 |
Photo: Chandrashekhar Basumatary / Flickr The cover of Rudencio Morais’s collection of prose poems, Os dialetos do Amor (filLetras Editora, 2018; The languages of love), features a wo... -
May 30, 2019 |
Photo: Greenwich Photography / Flickr The title of Ognjen Spahić’s Head Full of Joy (Dalkey Archive Press, 2018), which won the 2014 European Union Prize for Literature, underscores i...
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