New York. Oxford University Press. 2016. 215 pages.
This excellent study of the catalysts for four writers—Gabriel García Márquez, Charles Bukowski, Paul Auster, and Ha-ruki Murakami—is fascinating to…
MISCELLANEOUS
New York. The New Press. 2016. 202 pages. Without so much as a few lines’ hesitation, Alain Mabanckou extinguishes a persistent, haunting myth within The Lights of Pointe-Noire: despite cling…
New York. New York Review Books. 2016. 188 pages. The memoirs and fiction about Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76) that were published in the post–Mao People’s Republic (prc) disappointed Peking Univ…
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2015. 391 pages. Debates swirl as to whether and to what extent humans have affected and can affect the climate. Not surprisingly,…
Evanston, Illinois. Curbstone Books / Northwestern University Press. 2016. 120 pages. Where does one begin to speak of the Arab Spring, after all that has been expended in dreams, analysis, and lives?…
Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 2016. 370 pages. One hundred and two Palestinians in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States have contributed essays of about one thousand words each t…
New York. Columbia University Press. 2015. 322 pages. Constantly aware of her semantically loaded and ambitious title, Rebecca L. Walkowitz rightly focuses her epilogue on the mutability of “translate…
Brooklyn. Restless Books. 2016. 256 pages. Juan Villoro knows that soccer fans often enjoy rewatching and recounting a spectacular goal more than seeing it for the first time. Reading God Is Roun…
Budapest. Corvina. 2015. 278 pages. Merész magyarok (Bold Hungarians) is Krisztián Nyáry’s second collection of sketches and short essays within two years. It follows the very succesful …
New York. Simon & Schuster. 2015. 339 pages. Christopher Hitchens died in December 2011 from cancer, long before publication of four dozen of his previously uncollected essays, all commissioned by…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015. 493 pages. In his essay on Philip Massinger, T. S. Eliot wrote that good poets steal but convert their thefts into something new or at least different. Rob…
San Antonio, Texas. Wings Press. 2015. 290 pages. Outside the Margins: Literary Commentaries offers an in-depth look at the literature of international authors whose writings are “transformat…
Madrid/Frankfurt. Iberoamericana/Vervuert. 2015. 374 pages. Balancing native triumphalism and kowtowing to foreign views, this extensive collection evinces a pressing need: conveying Latin American li…
St. Petersburg, Florida. Three Pines Press. 2015. 155 pages. In the preface to this beautifully illustrated study of the significance of flowers in Chinese culture, An Lan Zhang first pays tribute to…
Paris. Minuit. 2015. 122 pages. Jean-Philippe Toussaint introduces his new book on a very saturnine note, suggesting that it will please nobody, neither intellectuals, who are indifferent to soccer, n…
Syracuse University Press. 2015. 190 pages. This book is not about the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008) but is, in many ways, a tribute to him and his poetry, which engaged Arabs eve…
New York. Bellevue Literary Press. 2015. 205 pages. In her new book, A Solemn Pleasure, Melissa Pritchard notes that “The ancient Latin root for pilgrim is per agrum, one who walks b…
New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University Press. 2015. 377 pages. In the opening pages of this ambitious memoir—in which its author tracks the career of his own curiosity through a lifetime of dedicated…
Lagrasse, France. Verdier. 2015. 125 pages. A professor of literary studies at the University of Geneva, Laurent Jenny is best known as a critic and theorist, with an impressive body of scholarly work…
Mexico City. Aguilar. 2014. 651 pages. This magisterial biography—already published in an abridged French version with an English one forthcoming—is the painstaking work of an eminent critic of Mexica…
Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 2015. 279 pages. Highly acclaimed, best-selling author Peter Balakian is the preeminent Armenian writer in English today, whether the genre is poetry (Ziggura…
Barcelona. Alfaguara. 2015. ISBN 9788420419169 Mario Vargas Llosa’s latest play, Los cuentos de la peste, was first performed at Madrid’s Teatro Español in early 2015. Directed by Joan Ollé,…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015. ISBN 9780865478275 Iain Sinclair sets out on his quest for the ghosts and spirits of members of the Beat Generation because “I needed a new mythology to sh…
Mari Yoshihara & Juliet Winters Carpenter, tr. New York. Columbia University Press. 2015. ISBN 9780231163026. Minae Mizumura is no stranger to accolades, having won major awards for many of her bo…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2014. ISBN 9780374259969 For translator, poet, and literary critic Michael Hofmann, linguistic encounters remain entrenched in the state of being bilingual: “The…