“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…

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…

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 trad…

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…

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 pub…

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, b…

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 origina…

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 Captiv…

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, dr…

  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 Br…

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 v…

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 she…

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 more…

Portrait of Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) by A. Ferrazzi(Casa Leopardi, Recanati, Italy, 1820). Source: Wikipedia. A review of Zibaldone, by Giacomo Leopardi. Ed. Michael Caesar…

When mortals love one anotherthey will live in mutual understanding forever;and many things will succeed,…

A Short Tale of ShameAngel Igov tr. Angela Rodel Open Letter, 2013 A Short Tale of Shame is the first full-length novel from Bulgarian short-story writer and critic Angel Igo…