A Progressive on the Prairie

There’s certainly one thing Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin did. It had me pondering how, among other things, age impacts my reading tastes.

About halfway through a noted author’s new novel set in South Dakota and its history, I gave up. I picked up a postapocalyptic novel, one of my favorite SF subgenres. I [...]

“I had nothing to do with it.”

That’s what the title character says in the opening sentence of Philippe Claudel’s novel Brodeck. And while Brodeck is right, he has been given the task of detailing how the small village in which he lives felt it had no choice but to kill an outsider.

There are several [...]

A 975-page novel probably isn’t the best for the first “microreview,” especially one as widely praised and condemned as Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.

The book won two of France’s highest literary awards before being translated into English — although it is written by an American. It is the fictional, but exceptionally well researched, memoir [...]

In announcing that Herta Müller won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy said simply that she is someone who, with her poetry and “the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” In The Appointment, the work of hers most recently translated into English, Müller shows that landscape is not [...]

Normally, “fog of war” refers to the ambiguity and confusion encountered by military men, from commanders through ground soldiers, combatants during a war or battle. Yet the fog can envelop more than the military. There is also a fog of uncertainty and confusion in a city under siege or its inhabitants. Lebanese [...]

Even during the height of Communism, Albania was an outlier, a dystopia seemingly little noticed by most of the world. Here was a country whose dictator, Enver Hoxha, broke ties with the Soviet Union because he believed criticizing and abandoning Stalinism was “revisionism.” Having then allied the country with Red China, Hoxha broke [...]

No one is immune from genre-bashing. What’s come to be known as historical fiction is one of those genres at which I tend to look askance. I’m guilty of often considering it little more than a costume drama, where the author simply places characters and situations in a historical setting. [...]

Mention Russian literature and most people think of two things. One is the pre-revolution authors whose names are familiar in the West, such as Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The other is the Soviet era, where the government controlled what was published and writers like Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vasily Grossman struggled to [...]