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World Books
World Books Review: African ‘Dreams in a Time of War’
A compelling African memoir whose unblinking candor about human behavior suggests the iconoclastic, unsentimental approach of such authors as Czesław Miłosz and I.B. Singer, writers whose recreation of a vanished world is tough-minded rather than sentimental.
World Books Review: An Urgent “February”
Canadian writer Lisa Moore’s second novel, a harrowing tale of loss, solidifies her reputation as a gifted writer whose prose exhibits an urgency, precision, and sensitivity worthy of the legacy of Virginia Woolf.
World Books Review: The Hypnotic Monsieur Pain
Set against the background of the Spanish Civil War, Roberto Bolaño’s 1999 suspense novel is one of those rare page turners you won’t want to put down, even after you figure out that essential pieces to the puzzle are missing.
World Books Review: Diary of Some Bad Years
One of literature’s greatest living authors, J. M. Coetzee, writes his own posthumous fictionalized biography, in which he airs his deepest fears that no number of awards or marriages or friends can ever fully dispel the universal human certitude that one is a talentless fraud and an unlovable misanthrope.
World Books Review: Perils of the Pansexual
This novel about a young woman who wakes up to find that her big toe has become a penis was a major bestseller in Japan, and it’s easy to see why. The book is titillating, disturbing without being disgusting, and reads like a self-help guide on the subjects of sex and love.
World Books Review: The Brilliance of Ordinary Lives
Perhaps this latest, and possibly last book, from the amazing Czech writer Joseph Skvorecky will make the Nobel prize committee take notice of an author who proffers the wisdom that comes with living long enough to sort out so many of the mysteries which plague us when we are young.
World Books Review: The Birth of Infinity
The contest between French and Russian mathematicians who sought new answers to one of the oldest puzzles in math, the nature of infinity, inspired this intriguing book. The French school chased rationalist solutions, while the Russian mathematicians were reportedly inspired by mystical insights attained through their religious practice, visions into the infinite that led to the founding of descriptive set theory.
World Books Review: American Writers in Istanbul
“American Writers in Istanbul” should have been a fascinating example of multicultural literary analysis, but academic jargon and heavy-handed politicizing get in the way.
World Books Podcast: Pornografia Redux
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Hailed by Milan Kundera as one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, Polish novelist and playwright Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) has not garnered the readership in English he deserves. That may change with the efforts of Danuta Borchardt, who has translated three of Gombrowicz’s novels. Her latest translation is of his 1966 novel “Pornografia.” (She won a National Translation Award for her version of “Ferdydurke,” Gombrowicz’s classic black comedy about the virtues of immaturity.) World Books editor Bill Marx talks to Borchardt about the erotic gamesmanship in “Pornografia,” the hazards of translating from the Polish, and why she decided to translate Gombrowicz in the first place.
World Books Review: The Creative Mystery of Clarice Lispector
In his superb biography, Benjamin Moser has done an amazing amount of research on the life of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, particularly on how powerfully her Jewish background influenced her fiction, so that the enigmatic writer emerges as a complete yet complex figure.
World Books Interview: Spreading the Word about European Fiction
An interview with Aleksander Hemon, editor of “Best European Fiction 2010,” the inaugural volume in an annual series dedicated to international writing. He believes that European short story writers are “not afraid of intellectually engaging the reader, of making the reader work.”
World Books: International Reads for the Holidays
“Your Face Tomorrow, Volume Three: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell”: the final volume in Javier Marías’s trio of spy novels extraordinaire is part of World Book’s idiosyncratic round-up of first-rate international literary stocking stuffers.
World Books Review: Best European Fiction 2010
Overall, this debut volume in an annual anthology series dedicated to new fiction from Europe proves to be interesting and strong, featuring a range of voices from 35 countries including such celebrated writers as Alasdair Gray, Viktor Pelevin, and David Albahari.
World Books Review: Reading Jung’s “Red Book”
An examination of the recent publication and translation into English (ninety years after it was begun) of Carl Gustav Jung’s confessional meditation “The Red Book.” The volume stands in a select company of books that exerted an enormous influence on social and intellectual history even while it remained unpublished.
World Books Review: Facing the Devils in the Mirror
The all-too-human protagonists of Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya, such as the spoiled rich girl at the center of his latest novel in translation, The She-Devil in the Mirror, can’t help but absorb the inhuman culture of violence around them.
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