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.

Last Baghdad patrol; “The Gamble”; the challenge from Iran

On patrol in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood; author Tom Ricks on US troops pulling out of Iraqi cities; and Karim Sadjadpour on the challenge posed by Iran.

>>>Listen to the podcast

Chris Merrill’s summer reading recommendations

It’s summer, so we’ve asked The World’s book critic Chris Merril for some good beach reads – or for those of us in parts of the country that are totally water logged, good rainy day reads. Chris never fails to connect us with good books from all over the globe – read his recommendations here.

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.

World Books Review: Mao Madness

Rich in intellectual detail, character and cuisine, this novel is a history lesson cast in the form of a mystery, part of an effort by many Chinese writers to exhume and examine their country’s Maoist past.

World Books Review: Fallout Girl

“Every day I buckle on my guns and go out to patrol the dingy city. I’ve been doing it so long that I’m shaped to it, like a hand that’s been carrying buckets in the cold.” So begins author Marcel Theroux’s “Far North,” a novel of post-apocalypse set in Siberia. It’s an interesting geographic choice for this kind of story, as Siberia is one of the few places in the world that already looks as desolate and ravaged as a post-apocalyptic landscape. Theroux, who has both spent time on the Great Steppe, and also filmed a documentary on settlers who have chosen to move back to Chernobyl, does a remarkable job evoking the breath-freezing cold of that world, giving even the novel’s most implausible ideas the ring of truth.

World Books Review: A Journey Through Literary Time

Jose Manuel Prieto’s “Rex” is an adventure through time: not historical time, or physical time, so much as literary time, the dreamy, static continuum of impressions and formulations recorded across centuries and civilizations.

World Books Review: The Old Maid’s Tale

All great anti-utopian novels focus on a disturbing aspect of the present, pushing it to its most horrific conclusions. In “1984,” it’s the panoptic police state. In “Brave New World,” the sexualization and Americanization of England. In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the subjugation of women through the sanctification of childbirth. In Ninni Holmqvist’s “The Unit,” the issue in question is the way the childless, especially the childless elderly, are looked down upon as irrelevant.

Chris Merrill recommends these books from the Middle East

President Obama met this week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and will soon meet with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Seems like a good opportunity to check in with our book critic, Christopher Merrill and ask him to select books about the region to highlight for us.

The Crisis of Islamic Civilization

Islam as a religion is central to the lives of over a billion people, but its outer expression as a distinctive civilization has been undergoing a monumental crisis. Buffeted by powerful adverse currents, Islamic civilization today is a shadow of its former self. The most disturbing and possibly fatal of these currents—the imperial expansion of the West into Muslim lands and the blast of modernity that accompanied it—are now compounded by a third giant wave, globalization.

World Books #28: Award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky

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