The Devil in the Flesh: Adultery in WW I, France
Raymond Radiguet, the 16 year old author of The Devil in the Flesh / “Le Diable au Corps,” 1923, died …
Category Archives: Fiction
The Absolutist: A Novel of War Time Refusal
John Boyne, born in Dublin in 1971, manages to summon the spirits of two very particular men, sent to fight …
Cities of Salt: The Trench — The Pit in the Desert
Abdelrahman Munif‘s trilogy,* Cities of Salt is one of those era-defining efforts of literary imagination and craft. It has been called …
Cities Of Salt: Wadi No More
Cities of Salt, a sweeping trilogy* of novels, and particularly the first, with the same name, by Abdelrahman Munif does …
WW I in Paris: Murder in Aurora
The Past Recaptured (1932), the US title and Frederick Blossom translation of Le Temps retrouvé, is the seventh volume of Marcel Proust’s immortal Remembrance …
A Mind at Peace — But Not So We’d Know it; A Novel from Turkey
There is the old adage ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say it at all’ which is at least …
Swords of Ice: A Modern Novel from Turkey
When we move from country to country, culture to culture we recognize many things in their generalities: carpets, clothes, foods, …
War in Afganistan, 1841 — The Widow’s Husband
Tamim Ansary, Afghan-American since childhood, and author of the very fine Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic …
The Idle Years — A Short Novel from Turkey
Orhan Kemal would not be one of the widely known names of Turkish literature in the West, unlike his semi name-share, …
The Rage of the Vulture: Barry Unsworth in Turkey
Barry Unsworth, the English Booker Prize winning novelist has written many memorable books, perhaps best known being Sacred Hunger (1992), …
Violence Is My Theme — Vladimir Sorokin
Add this to my lengthening to-read-before-you-die list: From The Telegraph’s Best Fiction Books 2011: Moscow, 2028. A scream, a moan, …
The Mule – A Novel from Spain
Spain was the country of some former life of mine, I’m sure. I loved living there as a younger man …