Me Against the World – Kazufumi Shiraishi
Cancer is suicidal, we learn. Ghosts are only capable of uninteresting platitudes.
The Great Latin American Novel – Carlos Fuentes
What is most characteristic of this collection is this hunger for interconnectedness, a genuine belief that books are rewritings of other books, that the novel is not so novel.
Motherland Hotel – Yusuf Atilgan
I’m probably slightly more informed about Turkey than the average American. What that means in reading Motherland Hotel is that I creatively misread it.
Selected Writings – René Magritte
Even though some of his distorted figures resemble those by Dalí, and some of the cruel acts committed in his scenes recall Balthus, Magritte’s career presents a wider-reaching institutional philosophy.
How to Travel Without Seeing – Andrés Neuman
Neuman’s humor, at its best, does more than make us laugh: it reveals the absurdity of the world we live in, and the world Neuman is traveling through.
Games with Greta & Other Stories – Suzana Tratnik
Tratnik is not interested in portraying Slovenia’s queer scene as a bastion of solidarity and fellow-feeling.
The Attraction of Things / Story of Love in Solitude – Roger Lewinter
Lewinter asserts that time, as a sentence, visible in its extent on the page, durational in its reading but not in its image, is a mass, present all at once, although aggregated like granite.
Johanne, Johanne – Lars Sidenius
Johanne’s texts say little, and what they say, they repeat. Unlike a diary or a letter — an intimate glimpse into the mind of its writer — the texts keep the reader at arm’s length, establishing their relationship as a closed system, a secret affair that leaves out even the reader.
The Young Bride – Alessandro Baricco
This novel is a captivating, fable-like story about a family that lives each day the same as the last in order to suspend the passage of time. It is a quirky, beautiful, and warmly humorous reflection on how the fear of our own mortality affects the way that we live our lives.
Describing the Past – Ghassan Zaqtan
And I do not mean to elide that these stories are Palestinian, as is the loss they both recall and presage.