“The Dream of My Return” by Horacio Castellanos Moya: Droll Paranoia from El Salvador
Horacio Castellanos Moya was born in Honduras (1957), grew up in El Salvador, went into exile in Mexico and now teaches …
Tag Archives: Books:Translation
Tigers on the Tenth Day — Fabled Syria
Zakaria Tamer (b 1931 in Damascus) has been in exile from his native Syria in England since the early 1980s where …
1914: Slender Novel, Big War
Although Jean Echenoz is both widely read and a winner of multiple literary prizes in France you’d have to …
The Great Swindle: Opportunities in France, 1919
Pierre Lemaitre has won a substantial following both in his native France and abroad for writing crime fiction. His Commandant Camille …
Zinky Boys: Russian Dead in Foreign Lands
Zinky Boys, Svetlana Alexievich‘s third book, and the third about war, reveals in it’s flip, bitter title, the pervading feeling …
Boots to the Sun — An Italian Memoir of the “Great War”
Two indispensable companions are always with me on late-life trips across the seven continents. Leading the way is my excited-to-be-there, take-everything-in life …
Naples Liberated: Curzio Malaparte’s “The Skin”
It is hard to think of another work of fiction of such savage irony as Curzio Malaparte‘s La Pelle (1949) …
Xiao Hong — Women in Rural China
Some months ago I saw The Golden Era, a recent movie by Ann Hui about a ground breaking Chinese woman writer …
The Comedy of Charleroi – Courage and Cowardice in WW I
“The captain … was due to retire in October. In the very first burst of fire he was swept out …
The Monstrous Enterprise — Céline on the War
The first one-fifth of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, [1934, Ralph Manheim translation, 1983] is from …
A Classic from Poland – “The Doll” by Boleslaw Prus
The most unusual book in my reading universe this year has to be the 1890 Polish classic, The Doll (“Lalka”) …
WW I: Warning the World about the War
With very few exceptions, all the books we associate with World War I — fiction, memoir, poetry– were written after …