New York. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2017. 304 pages. When Umberto Eco died in early 2016, he had just finished putting together a collection of essays entitled Pape Satán Aleppe: Cronache di…
MISCELLANEOUS
New York. New Directions. 2018. 240 pages.In 2014 Daesh militants launched an assault on Sinjar in northern Iraq, home to hundreds of thousands of Yazidis—a religious minority whose belief system is l…
2 vols. Budapest. Jelenkor. 2017. 611 & 596 pages.Péter Nádas is a writer with deep roots in the past. His first, short novel, Egy családregény vége (End of a family novel), published in…
Barcelona. Literatura Random House. 2016. 144 pages.If it wasn’t for the inevitably personal way in which this brief text was conceived, the argument of El punto ciego (The blind spot), by th…
Seattle. Fantagraphics Books. 2017. 264 pages.Standing on his balcony in the neighborhood of Sin el-Fil in east Beirut, Mazen Kerbaj plays his trumpet to the accompaniment of the Israeli air force, wh…
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The Best We Could Do. New York. Abrams ComicArts. 2017. 327 pages.Saigon Calling: London 1963–75. Vancouver. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2017. 280 pages.…
New York. Bloomsbury. 2017. 234 pages.Of the thousands of adages that elucidate translation, one of the most oft-quoted is Jorge Luis Borges’s “The original is unfaithful to the translation.” In these…
Brooklyn. Restless Books. 2018. 304 pages.Ismail Kadare’s first and only collection of essays translated into English, this time directly from the Albanian originals written between 1985 and 2006, off…
Lincoln, Nebraska. University of Nebraska Press. 2017. 345 pages.None can deny that we live in an age of incredible change. Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place as a Time is an…
New York. Penguin Classics. 2017. 177 pages.Emma Reyes’s letters written to the Colombian historian and critic Germán Arciniegas from the 1960s to the 1990s were discovered and published after her dea…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2017. 120 pages.Poppies of Iraq, an autobiographical graphic novel written by Brigitte Findakly and illustrated by Lewis Trondheim, contains familiar tropes o…
Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2017. 304 pages.Jorge Carrión begins this paean to bookshops by writing: “Every bookshop is a condensed version of the world.” This axiomatic declaration is important as…
Paris. Stock. 2017. 167 pages.Writer, painter, and sculptor Mahi Binebine is the first and only Moroccan artist to have his works included in the permanent collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New Y…
New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2017. 496 pages.Jonathan Blunk reaches far into the future with this luminous biography of one of the finest and most important American poets of the twentieth cen…
New York. Feminist Press. 2017. 128 pages.Mireille Gansel’s lyrical and evocative Translation as Transhumance, itself beautifully and elegantly translated by Ros Schwartz, is a moving tribute…
Saint-Clément-de-Rivière, France. Fata Morgana. 2017. 207 pages.In the early pages of this book, the author claims that the French word hasard (“chance”) derives from the Arabic word az-zahr…
Athens, Ohio. Ohio University Press / Swallow Press in conjunction with Sky Blue Press. 2017. 349 pages.Anaïs Nin, queen of online inspirational quotes, legend of erotic literature still taboo in 2017…
New York. Nation Books. 2017. 272 pages.In 2015, with the death of Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, Latin America lost one of its finest literary voices and one of the staunchest critics of the explo…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2017. 256 pages.The publication of Into English will soon be considered a watershed moment in the study of literary translation; indeed, the fact that such a book…
London. Nick Hern Books. 2016. 210 pages.British actress Harriet Walter (who won a Tony Award nomination for Mary Stuart on Broadway in 2009) offers feminist essays on major Shakespearean rol…
Paris. Gallimard. 2017. 177 pages.“God doesn’t exist. Phew! I said it.” This profession of lack of faith is found early in Salim Bachi’s latest work, which combines autobiographical narrative with ref…
New York. Random House. 2016. 243 pages.So few books manage to convey the emotional anguish of searching for an answer as well as Hisham Matar’s recent Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir, The Return…
Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2017. 526 pages.The first comprehensive biography of the Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet Czesław Miłosz was published in Kraków…
New York. New Directions. 2017. 303 pages.When one thinks of Argentine literature, two names immediately come to mind: Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, usually in that order. I read them both ass…
Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2017. 400 pages.In the late 2000s, Kapka Kassabova undertook a trek along the southern border of her birthplace, Bulgaria. Through her journey, the author sought to examin…