Mathias Énard / Photo © Marc Melki / Courtesy of New Directions The quickest way to turn someone off from the possibility of reading Mathias Énard’s astounding novel, Compass (New Directions…

Zoran Živković’s Hidden Camera (translated by Alice Copple-Tošić) unfolds within that indefinite space between dream and reality. Upon receiving a mysterious film-screening invitatio…

Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, translated by Alison Anderson, is a pairing of two witty, charming protagonists: Renée, a fifty-four-year-old con…

Photos by Jen Rickard Blair We’ve all come across books marked up by some fiend with no appreciation for the sanctity of the written word. Senseless underlining of unremarkable sentences, pedantic not…

“There was the music and the clutter of voices from the big house, and the wind shoving and pulling at them, and she thought, I want this, I know I want this. This is how you get from one world to the…

This week is a celebration of several new milestones: the Man Booker shortlist came out, with Colm Tóibín’s novel, The Testament of Mary, coming in as the shortest nominated book in the prize…

“They say time finds you out, don’t they?”– The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending is a quiet sort of novel. His narrator introsp…