World Books
World Books Interview: Homage to “The Halfway House”
An interview with Cuban writer José Manuel Prieto about the English translation of the late Guillermo Rosales’s “The Halfway House,” a powerful novel about exile, revolution, and mental illness.
World Books Review: A Chic “Celestina”
Written in the fifteenth century, “Celestina” remains a classic work of Spanish literature that, in a lively new English version by the acclaimed translator Margaret Sayers Peden, proffers all the sex, drama, and violence necessary for an HBO mini-series.
World Books Review: Chased out of Paradise
Paula Jacques’s “Light of My Eye” is a heart-wrenching novel about the dissolution of Egyptian Jewish life, the tale of a people displaced ten years after World War II.
World Books Review: Crime and Punishment “As God Commands”
Niccolò Ammaniti, the internationally best-selling author of “I’m Not Scared,” comes up with another compelling tale of gritty crime and desperate punishment, this time revolving around a father and son facing a variety of demons.
World Books Review: A Crown of Thorns for Mandelstam
“The Stalin Epigram” is offered as a novelist’s homage to Osip Mandelstam, the poet who embodied both a new era in Russian poetry and the martyrdom of Russia’s intelligentsia under Stalinism. But the book turns out to be a crown of thorns, a posthumous offense to a poet who has few defenders at the ready to fence for his honor.
World Books Review: Of Violence and Beauty
Colombian author Evelio Rosero has been writing about the miseries of his homeland for three decades now. His novels, many of which take on the internecine wars, kidnappings, murders, and political upheavals of his country, have won numerous awards (including, humorously enough, the National Literature Prize from the Colombian Ministry of Culture). His work is notorious for being brutally realistic, even hyperrealistic, and “The Armies,” which won 2009 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, is no exception.
World Books Interview: Death and the Beauty Salon
Mexican writer Mario Bellatín’s growing international literary reputation as a leading Spanish-language experimentalist suggests that he’s a pop innovator focused on the grotesque, playfully obsessed with the consciousness of the outcast.
World Books Review: I Want to be a Showbiz Solipsist
Veteran Brazilian writer Ignácio de Loyola Brandão expertly lampoons the vapidity of celebrity culture, the tyranny of the photo-op, in his latest novel.
World Books Review: Confronting Zimbabwe
“An Elegy for Easterly” is a vibrant collection of stories that artfully combines humor and horror in its depiction of the struggle to survive in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
World Books Review: Two Volumes of Swiss Horror
Though separated by a century and a half, these two Swiss novellas detailing the outbreak of uncanny terror in rural communities paint surprisingly similar, and memorable, visions of social repression and religious hypocrisy.
World Books Review: Start Making Sense
The prolific Yoko Tawada has a considerable reputation in Europe: her writing — novels, plays, poems, essays, and short stories — has garnered a number of awards, including the Akutagawa Prize and the Goethe Medal.
World Books Feature: Summer Reads for the Adventurous
It may be summer, but your brain needn’t go on vacation. My summer list of fiction in translation that demands and repays close attention.
World Books Review: Driving the Mean Streets of Paris
He’s far too poetic to pass for Martin Scorsese’s Travis Bickle, but the ruminative nighttime cab-driver who narrates “Night Roads,” the fourth novel by Russian writer Gaito Gazdanov (1903-1971) wheels guiltily and memorably through the same type of hollowed–out urban apocalypse.
World Books Podcast: A Child’s View of Communism
In this World Books podcast, Hungarian writer Ferenc Barnás talks about his autobiographical novel “The Ninth,” which melds the sophistication of stream-of-consciousness with a child’s eye view of survival amid repression in an authoritarian state.
World Books Interview: Cao Naiqian and the Other China
Cao Naiqian’s terse style may owe something to the writer’s ‘legit’ job – since 1972 he has been a police detective in the Public Security Bureau of Datong City. Set in rural China during the Cultural Revolution, his stories are not routine police tales but offer indelible images of people on the edge, raw yet poetic depictions of violence and despair rooted in the denial of elemental needs for food, sex, and respect.
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