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Book Review: Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia

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 have their […]

Book Review: Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin

Some authors take time creating an overall feel for their book. But when you’re writing a novella of well under 100 pages, you don’t have much time to set the tone. Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin doesn’t waste any establishing the tenor of Beauty Salon. He does it with the first two sentences: “A few years […]

Book Review: The Interrogation by J.M.G. Le Clézio

When J.M.G. Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize for Literature last October, he unwittingly became part of an international ruckus. Just the month before, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the prize jury, said the United States was “too isolated, too insular” when it came to literature. That “ignorance,” Engdahl said, exists in part because […]

Book Review: God’s Mercy by Kerstin Ekman

Sense of place is not just a combination of geography and culture, it is a synergy of the two. Swedish author Kerstin Ekman doesn’t seek to describe sense of place in her novel God’s Mercy. She does something far more difficult. Sense of place so permeates the novel it moves from being a setting to […]

Book Review: The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist

Worried about retirement or maintaining your standard of living in your “old age”? The near-future country in which Swedish author Ninni Holmqvist’s first novel, The Unit, is set has a comfortable future in store for many women 50 and older and men 60 and older.

Imagine this: Your own, fully furnished apartment in a complex […]