Paris. Les Belles Lettres. 2014. ISBN 9782251310107Tutsi genocide survivor Elise Rida Musomandera’s memoir Le Livre d’Élise (Elise’s book) is an honest and powerful portrait of Musomande…
MISCELLANEOUS
New York. Knopf. 2015. ISBN 9780385351058Poet Jane Hirshfield, a passionate advocate and resourceful explicator of poetry, evokes the “mysterious quickening [that] inhabits the depths of any good poem…
Susanne Fusso, tr. DeKalb, Illinois. Northern Illinois University Press. 2014. ISBN 9780875807157Nearly all the recognizable elements of Russian literature can be found within the pages of Sergey Gand…
Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press. 2014. ISBN 9780691161907Professor Williams’s math class is having a bad day. It’s the first week after spring break at bucolic Roberts College,…
Melanie Moore & Clare Kitson, tr. London. Glagoslav. 2014. ISBN 9781784379070 When a journalist outgrows her role as a dispassionate recorder of events and wants to share her deep unders…
Sara Meli Ansari, tr. Berkeley, California. Soft Skull Press / Counterpoint. 2014. ISBN 9781593766016 In Letter to Jimmy, Alain Mabanckou gives a heartfelt tribute to James Baldwin. Gazi…
Pasadena, California. Red Hen Press. 2014. ISBN 9781597095372Adrianne Kalfopoulou, poet, professor, and Plathian scholar, currently lives and teaches in Athens, Greece, where she teaches at Helle…
New York. Simon & Schuster. 2015. ISBN 9781451682007B & Me begins with a crisis: the author, J. C. Hallman, has lost faith in his lifelong passion, literature, and wants, needs…
New York. Viking. 2014. ISBN 9780670015832 In times of love and war, many people write letters—all of them of interest to someone. But except for the participants themselves, their extended famil…
Carter Kaplan, ed. Brookline, Massachusetts. International Authors. 2014. ISBN 9781499703719 Emanations: Foray into Forever is a refreshingly focused collection—focused by staking out a…
Norman. University of Oklahoma Press. 2014. ISBN 9780806144795Starting where her previous memoir, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (1997) left off, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Outlaw Woman: A Memoir…
Belgrade. Self-published. 2014. ISBN 9788691799502In Serbia, Snežana Radojičić is not an unknown author. For her first book, the short novel Dok su duše lutale (1994), she was awarded a…
Bhaskar Chattopadhyay, ed. & tr. New York / New Delhi. Harper Perennial / HarperCollins India. 2014. ISBN 9789351361930Satyajit Ray’s roots as a filmmaker are in the visual arts and lite…
New York. Bloomsbury. 2013. ISBN 9781608195213In Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward crafts a beautiful narrative about loss, grief, and remembrance. Ward’s second novel, Salvage the Bones, e…
Newark / Lanham, Maryland. University of Delaware Press / Rowman & Littlefield. 2013. ISBN 9781611494549Mortality’s Muse is a rare book: thoroughly researched, genially delivered. Th…
New York. Picador. 2014. ISBN 9781250039569Alcoholics offer various reasons for their addiction. Fitzgerald believed, or rationalized, that liquor heightens the emotions, enabling him to make his…
Elzbieta Matynia, tr. New Haven. Yale University Press. 2014. ISBN 9780300204032 In 1978 eight dissidents met on a mountainside on the border between Czechoslovakia and Poland, countries under Co…
Paris. Seuil. 2014. ISBN 9782370210371Regarde les lumières mon amour is a wonderful addition to Annie Ernaux’s life writings. Her observations of social life in a Parisian suburb reveal…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2014. ISBN 9780300153002As a young man of twenty-one, Wilfred Owen remained the boy who posed in a family snapshot as a proud soldier with gun in on…
Will H. Corral, Juan E. De Castro, and Nicholas Birns, eds. New York. Bloomsbury. 2013. ISBN 9781441142597 This unique collection of essays by fifty scholars and writers on the work of sixty-nine…
New York. Bloomsbury. 2014. ISBN 9781608198061 It is difficult to imagine tackling such a complex and emotionally wrought subject as preparing for one’s parents’ deaths in a graphic memoir, but t…
D. J. Walker, tr. San Francisco. City Lights. 2013. ISBN 9780872865747 Nan Dòmi is Mimerose Beaubrun’s fascinating, first-person narration recounting her study of, and initiation in…
Jeremy Tiang, tr. Singapore. Epigram Books. 2013. ISBN 9789810766702Durians Are Not the Only Fruit is a delightfully atypical publication to find in English. A well-read person will be expect…
Champaign, Illinois. Dalkey Archive Press. 2014. ISBN 9781628970142 What do we see when we read? For Warren Motte, the question is more properly stated, what do we see reflected when we…
Witold Gombrowicz. Kronos. Kraków. Wydawnictwo Literackie. 2013 ISBN 9788308050781In the view of most critics, Dzienniki (Diaries) is among the best writings of Witold Gombrowicz (19…