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Novel
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: A Welcome ‘Return’ to Form
What’s impressive about the thirteen stories in this volume is the coherence of Roberto Bolaño’s vision. Though the tales take place in different countries and different time periods, though some are straight fiction, some are vaguely autobiographical, and some even drift towards magical realism, each new yarn feels like a chapter in a continuous narrative.
World Books Review: ‘The Original of Laura”
The striking feature of Dmitri Nabokov’s edition of his father’s final unfinished novel is the wresting of authorial control, by a son, from a man whose deep obsession with control was manifest throughout his literary career.
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: 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.
German author wins Nobel
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Herta Müller has been awarded the Nobel prize for literature. The Romanian born author is renowned for her books based on life under the harsh regime of the dictator Ceausescu. Müller was born in 1953 in the German-speaking town of Nitzkydorf in Romania. Jeb Sharp profiles the German author. Download MP3
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.
‘Blood Safari’
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Marco Werman talks with our book critic Christopher Merrill about a new novel called “Blood Safari” from South African writer Deon Meyer. Download MP3
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.
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