World Books
World Books Review: An Authoritative Gathering of Modern Chinese Drama
Minor translation issues aside, “The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama”‘s excellent selection, colloquial and stage-friendly translations, and illuminating introduction undoubtedly make the volume the authoritative choice in teaching and reading modern Chinese drama for the foreseeable future.
World Books Review: Lodgings — A Generous Selection of Verse from an Intriguing Polish Poet
A problematic selection of poems from Andrzej Sosnowski, an impressive contemporary Polish poet whose writing combines antic playfulness and insistent earnestness.
World Books Review: Adonis’s Selected Poems — A Giant of Arabic Verse
Syrian poet Adonis has has been compared to both Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot in his modernist sensibility and influence — perhaps both in one person makes a better comparison.
World Books Review: The Weekend – A Portrait of German Guilt
In this novel, German writer Bernhard Schlink wants to explore the powerful guilt that the German people still feel after World War II, how they are still rightly disturbed by displays of nationalism and religiosity parading under the banners of truth and justice.
World Books Debate: The Best Translated Book Awards
Here’s the 25 book long list of the fiction finalists for the 2011 Best Translated Book Awards for listeners and readers to comment on, augment, and generally kick around. The point of the BTBA is not simply to recognized high merit (in fiction and poetry), but to expand the consciousness of the reading public. This is one of the few prizes in the country that honors original works in translation; at the very least, it should stimulate conversation about the importance (and neglect) of literature in translation.
What do you think?
World Books Review: A Glimpse of the Heart of Modern Pakistani Poetry
In all, the anthology smacks of the editors’ having taken the bland, easy way out at almost every stage. It takes second, third, closer readings to discern individuality among the Pakistani poets, and there are several lovely and powerful poems that emerge from such close reading, poems of love and politics and of faith — not the mere journal entries of so much Western verse.
World Books Remembrance: Heda Kovaly
Translating what became “Under a Cruel Star” by Heda Kovaly was a labor of love as well as a work of feminism. There were few memoirs around of a life that spanned Nazism and Stalinism. None was written by a woman.
World Books Review: Remembering “The Wrong Blood”
Balancing the domestic and the tragic, The Wrong Blood explores the ways in which political history and personal histories intertwine: the novel is an invaluable reminder of how, in the midst of war, love and continuity preserve the potential for a richer life despite the disaster.
World Books Review: Of Spongy Minds and Award-Winning Books
Call it anarchistic boorishness, an artist chomping on the hand that feeds him. But at least in this book Thomas Bernhard is honest about why he welcomes awards — he wants the money, especially because the amounts, given European largess to its culture-makers, are considerable.
World Books Review: Visitation — Difficulty for Difficulty’s Sake?
That Jenny Erpenbeck’s latest novel, Visitation, is ambitious is unmistakable, for it is undeniably difficult and precisely crafted. Following in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot, who suggested that a difficult world as ours calls for a difficult literature, I think it a moot point as to whether the novel ultimately succeeds in its being difficult. Is it really difficult for difficulty’s sake? After finishing this novel I have to admit my own ambivalence, not based on, admittedly, its philosophical import, but because of the way it reads.
World Books Review: From Iran and Japan, Two Modern Visions of Horror
Thankfully, these fascinating short novels, while they provide plenty of genuine scares, transcend the grisly genre of “ghost stories” or “tales of madness,” partly because their authors self-consciously manipulate staid spine-tingling formulas.
World Books Review: Tom McCarthy’s C
Catastrophic, consummate, and above all, cryptic
For all of the faults of this novel, which is on the shortlist for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, one can’t help but keep turning the pages. Author Tom McCarthy explores a darkness that is unpleasant, tedious, and disturbing, but also timely and fascinating. >>Read Tommy Wallach’s review
World Books Review: A Norwegian Ghost Story
Winner of this year’s prestigious International Ibsen Award, Norwegian writer Jon Fosse is considered one of Europe’s finest living playwrights. Yet he is virtually unknown in America. Judging from this compelling novella, the neglect is not deserved.
World Books Review: A Masterpiece From Israel
Israeli novelist David Grossman’s new book is rooted in a reality so vivid, is so radiant with life, and is so precise in its delineation of its characters that it would be an important addition to the world’s literature at any time. But its publication now, when leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Territories are trying to broker a lasting peace, makes it required reading in a way few novels ever are.
World Books Review: David Grossman’s Lost Faith
In his most recent collection of essays on the intersection of politics and literature, Israeli novelist David Grossman fears his country is losing its soul, its cultural responses are hardening, its spiritual resources weakening dangerously.
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