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 h…
MISCELLANEOUS
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, no…
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 be…
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 works…
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 Mexican…
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 (Ziggurat…
Barcelona. Alfaguara. 2015. ISBN 9788420419169Mario Vargas Llosa’s latest play, Los cuentos de la peste, was first performed at Madrid’s Teatro Español in early 2015. Directed by Joan Ol…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015. ISBN 9780865478275Iain Sinclair sets out on his quest for the ghosts and spirits of members of the Beat Generation because “I needed a new mythology t…
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 he…
New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2014. ISBN 9780374259969For translator, poet, and literary critic Michael Hofmann, linguistic encounters remain entrenched in the state of being biling…
Buenos Aires. Capital Intelectual. 2014. ISBN 9789876144612 Masks, among other things, may be monstrous or cute ambassadors of distant secrets, peoples, and truths. By cataloging her masks, passi…
Cambridge, Mass. / London. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2014. ISBN 9780674724730With neither footnotes nor endnotes nor a lengthy bibliography, Michael Schmidt’s 1,172-page study of the…
Marilyn Hacker, tr. Evanston, Illinois. Northwestern University Press. 2014. ISBN 9780810130081Born in Lebanon, Vénus Khoury-Ghata has lived in France since 1972. She has published forty boo…
New York. Riverhead Books / Penguin. 2015. ISBN 9781594633652 Mohsin Hamid, novelist and essayist, has lived in Pakistan, England, and the United States, cultivating a tension over identity…
New York / London. Henry Holt / Profile Books. 2014. ISBN 9780805095159 / 9781846685811 “Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.” Atul Gawande quotes Philip Roth to emphasize the seriousn…- Martin McLaughlin, tr. Boston. Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2014. ISBN 9780544146464 North American readers are familiar with the work of Italo Calvino primarily because of his fict…
New York. Liveright / W. W. Norton. 2015. ISBN 9781631490316Why did Nina Bunjevac’s mother, Sally, take her two daughters to Yugoslavia in 1975, abandoning her husband, Peter, and oldest child, Petey,…
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…
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…