I grew up longing for the day when I could tear down the veil of darkness and absurdity concealing the true face of the universe and discover at last a smile of kindness and wisdom; I grew up in the c
As Pankaj Mishra remarked in The Nation, one of the remarkable qualities ofBola?o’s short stories is that they can do the “work of a novel.” The InsufferableGaucho contains tales be
Pablo Neruda, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, finished writing The Captain's Verses in 1952 while in exile on the island of Capri--the paradisal setting for the blockbuster film Il Posti
Welcome to the not-too-distant future as envisioned by the remarkable Yoko Tawada. Japan, having vanished into the sea, is now remembered as "the land of sushi." Hiruko, a former citizen of the land of sushi and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in the Danish city of Odense with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): "homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. no time to learn three different languages. might mix up. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language most Scandinavian people understand.Hiruko soon makes new friends to join her in her travels as she searches for anyone who can still speak Japanese: Knute, a graduate student in linguistics, who is fascinated by her Panska; Akash, an Indian man who lives as a woman, wearing a red sari; Nanook, an Eskimo from Greenland, first mistaken as another refugee from the land of sushi; and Nora, who works at the Karl Marx House in Trier. All
