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World Books
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 Podcast: Of Naked Maidens and Sea Serpents
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The Italian Renaissance epic “Orlando Furioso,” was once a hot volume, at least among the literati, such as Shakespeare, and musicians, such as Scarlotti and Haydn. But Ludovico Ariosto’s long tale of knights and monsters duking it out largely dropped off the radar screen in the 20th century, though it was Italo Calvino’s favorite work of literature. Translator David R. Slavitt wants to rectify that with his English translation of the poem, the first in 30 years. World Books Editor Bill Marx talks to Slavitt, a veteran translator of over eighty volumes of poetry and fiction, about how his playful version reflects the giggly, surrealist mischievousness of the original. Download MP3
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: 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: 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 Podcast: Justine Hardy
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British journalist and author Justine Hardy has spent the last 20 years writing about Kashmir, a country of astonishing natural beauty caught in a violent territorial dispute between India and Pakistan. “In the Valley of Mist: One Family in a Changing World” looks at how a real-life middle-class Kashmiri family, the Dars, deal with their country’s turmoil and prejudices. World Books editor Bill Marx talks to Hardy about what she calls “Jihad Inc,” the responsibilities of storytelling in a troubled region, and the current state of life in Kashmir.
World Books: Herta Müller, Memory, and the Nobel
Now that the predictable “who is she?” brouhaha over this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for literature has ended, it is time to explore the artistry of Herta Müller, whose books consistently denounce the corruption of language and memory, often by reworking her own past experiences in innovative, lyrical, and evocative prose.
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.
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