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.

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World Books #28: Award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky

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Award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky talks to World Books Editor Bill Marx about “The Tanners,” an early work of fiction by the mysterious Swiss writer Robert Walser, a marginalized genius admired by J. M. Coetzee, Franz Kafka, and W. G. Sebald. She also reads an excerpt from her translation, the first in English, of the 1907 novel.