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 a…
Book Reviews
June 22, 2020
June 3, 2020Naoise 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 un…
May 6, 2020Neva Lukić / Courtesy of Cultural Institution Blesok The recent collection of short stories by Neva Lukić, Endless Endings (Bokeh, 2018), originally written in Croatian and translate…
April 23, 2020Left: 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…
April 21, 2020The 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 ef…
April 9, 2020Mildred 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, Chr…
March 10, 2020The 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, 2020Lafcadio 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 befor…
February 11, 2020The 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, 2020On 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 poe…
January 30, 2020India’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 Compa…
January 27, 2020Jurij 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 rece…
January 22, 2020Photo 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 medic…
January 16, 2020How 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, 2020Karl 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, 2019Shalev 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 minut…
November 5, 2019My 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 Columb…
October 28, 2019Many 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 a…
October 23, 2019Georg 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 hou…
August 21, 2019Readers 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. 1…
August 20, 2019Zhu 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 (Prin…
August 12, 2019Photo 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 layer…
July 24, 2019Amit 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’…
July 18, 2019Photo by Ethan Chiang / Flickr Contemporary Taiwanese Women Writers: An Anthology (Cambria Press, 2018) is a collection of short stories in translation featuring contemporary…
July 3, 2019Ever 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 Je…
Recent Posts
Photo by DW labs / Adobe Stock
In “crying out in his vindictive disarray, proclaiming that he has been, if not wayward, at least unassimilable…
Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (2004) transcended cultural boundaries to become a global environmental parable. This essay explores the…
Photo by Heiko / Stock.adobe.com
Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it…
The year 2025 has been a remarkable one for French writer Marc Alyn (b. 1937). First, La Rumeur libre published his three-volume collected works…
Not nearly enough writers are translators, but all translators are writers. (And novelists and poets and essayists and playwrights and memoirists.)…
