Ma Bo’le’s Second Life – Xiao Hong
The reader will have to decide if it is ok to do the wrong thing for the right reason or the right thing for the wrong reason or the right thing for the right reason or the wrong thing for the wrong reason.
I submit that playing along once in a while with games like Olafsson’s, games about the game of fiction, can be a useful reminder of how fiction works on us.
Revenge of the Translator – Brice Matthieussent
You could also say that it was her most transgressive, subversive move to forego revenge, content instead to disappear.
The American Soldier in Arab Novels
Iraqi writers, by and large, have created worlds where the soldier’s perspective, either Iraqi or foreign, isn’t primary.
Where the Bird Disappeared – Ghassan Zaqtan
Time isn’t linear, and it’s in this way that the book resists both nationalist and anti-nationalist narratives about how a Palestinian people have progressed or failed.
Familiar Things – Hwang Sok-Yong
FAMILIAR THINGS by renowned South Korean author Hwang Sok-Yong offers a vivid reminder that our mountains of detritus are also a human issue.
I’ve been thinking about death a lot. It’s hard not to when you’re carrying around a small, black volume wearing its name.
A Working Woman – Elvira Navarro
A review must mostly just be a curved letter to the author.
It’s easy to forget that stories are rarely the work of any individual, but part of a collective process of telling and retelling — borrowing, alluding or stealing. There’s reason to be hopeful.
Language, poetry, and the act of translation are, then, inherently communal acts because they all involve ways of knowing one’s self, sharing that self, and as a result, eliminating a sense of otherness among communities.