The Terrible Twos is a funny, sharp-edged fictional assault on all those sulky, spoiled naysayers needing instant gratification - Americans. Ishmael Reed's sixth novel depicts a zany, bizarre, and all
Two minutes into the second act, there is a knock on Nicolas Boehlmer’s dressing-room door, just as he’s smoking his last cigarette before having to go back on stage . . . and, without thinking, he sa
The delightful and daring English-language debut of French author Herve’ le Tellier is a series of short, intimately interconnected stories making up a lively user’s manual to pleasure, relating the v
Set in 1940s and ’50s provincial Brazil, House of the Fortunate Buddhas is perhaps most startling for it fiery, uninhibited, and highly compelling narrator. By force of her intelligence, courage, and
The gnomon is the part of a sundial that casts its shadow, and Gnomon: Essays on Contemporary Literature represents, in its author's words,"a report on ten years' watching of shadows." Collecting the
Difficult though it often is to recognize the value of a young author’s work when he is working in the shadow of an internationally recognized parent, it would be more difficult still not to appreciat
“A little thing happened to me. Which could have just as easily happened to you. You’re on vacation in a hotel with your son in a small village and you’re about to go see some friends, but something h
Milan Kundera on Marek Bienczyk’s Transparency: “The subject of transparency has always interested me; in The Art of the Novel I discussed it as one of the key words in my personal lexicon. Marek Bien
A major work of contemporary Turkish literature, Istanbul Was a Fairy Tale tells the stories of three generations of a Jewish family from the 1920s to the 1980s. Istanbul is their only home, and yet t
Tor Ulven is one of the most renowned Norwegian authors of the twentieth century, beginning his career writing poetry and ending it with unclassifiable explorations of the possibilities of prose, remi
Outside Tokyo, a tuberculosis sanatorium in the village of K has a six-bed ward that the narrator, an aspiring poet, shares with a student of linguistics and budding writer named Shiomi. After the stu
It is the early eighties, and the housing industry is booming. Previously unpopulated mountainous areas of the Japanese countryside are being leveled to accommodate new waves of people. Similarly, a n
It is 1936, and Albert B. is one of the first French citizens to join the Fascist party. During the war, he becomes a collaborator. It’s only a matter of time before he dons a German uniform himself.T
Perversely, but perhaps appropriately, Aidan Higgins—one of the few contemporary writers worthy of comparison with Beckett and Joyce, now celebrating his 85th year-—has chosen to wait until his sight
Adopting artist-poet Joe Brainard as its principal focus, this project presents “Pop poetics” not as a minor, coterie movement meriting a sympathetic footnote in accounts of the postwar era’s literary
Carrer Marsala, which won prizes from the City of Barcelona and the Generalitat de Catalunya—neither of which Bauca bothered to accept—is a relentless monologue delivered by a paranoid hypochondriac o
A collection of 34 short stories, originally published in 1935 and considered one of the defining texts of 20th-century Catalan fiction, reflects its culture's political and social upheavals as well a
Giovanni Orelli’s docufictional phantasmagoria revisits a lesser-known painting by Paul Klee titled Alphabet I, which features black letters and symbols scrawled over the sports page of a newspaper re
Focusing on the experiences of one particular family living in one particular house during these historic events, Ayse Kulin mixes fact and fiction, soap opera and Tolstoy, to bring to light the effec
