Crawley, Australia. UWA. 2016. 890 pages.Suzanne Falkiner’s prodigious biography of Randolph Stow is a book long awaited by many; not just the literati of his native Australia but those countless read…
MISCELLANEOUS
Boston. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2016. 211 pages.This slender but dazzling collection of thirteen essays, some previously published but refurbished, is primarily concerned with fiction and criticism…
San Antonio, Texas. Trinity University Press. 2016. 253 pages.There is a huge arc that links the first incomparable essay (on the atom-bomb crater at Trinity, New Mexico) to the final expansive one ab…
London. Telegram Books. 2016. 247 pages.There is a sort of prophetic air that accompanies much of the titular figure’s speech in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s About My Mother. Though autobiographi…
Vancouver, B.C. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2016. 272 pages.Marcelino Truong’s newly translated graphic memoir, Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon 1961–63, the first of two volumes, is a story of event…
New York. Europa Editions. 2016. 384 pages.In 1992 Edizioni e/o published a first novel, L’amore molesto, by an Italian writer who called herself “Elena Ferrante.” Its provocative cover featu…
New York. New York Review Books. 2016. 267 pages.In this memoir-cum-travelogue, Teffi, an immensely popular early-twentieth-century Russian satirist, tells of her chance escape from the throes of revo…
Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press. 2016. 210 pages.In this lushly illustrated exhibition catalog, Michigan State University Museum curators Marsha MacDowell, Mary Worrall, Lynne Swanson, and colle…
Toller Fratrum, UK. Little Toller Books (Dufour Editions, distr.). 2016 (©2015). 148 pages.For many children in Western culture, the first introduction to mermaids is via Disney’s cheerful cinematic a…
New York. Pantheon Books. 2015. 256 pages.Margo Jefferson, acclaimed journalist and critic, has written a tour de force on the black privileged class. Hers is an artful and complicated memoir that ach…
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2016. 304 pages.Despite their constant presence in the news, the countries traversed in this welcome graphic docu/memoir are still as alien to many North American read…
Vienna. Der Konterfei. 2015. 93 pages. Ukranian actor and journalist Olena Chekan died of a brain tumor just as protests calling for a freer and more democratic nation were erupting in 2013. In t…
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…
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 clingi…
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 Unive…
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, s…
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 li…
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 ea…
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 “translated…
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…
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 commissione…
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.…
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 “transformati…
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 lit…