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The Brazilian Bird of Prey: Four New Translations of Clarice Lispector
In his preface to Clarice Lispector’s A Breath of Life (Pulsations), editor Benjamin Moser calls the four new translations from New Directions of Lispector’s novels—including Água Viva, Near to the...
View ArticleVíctor Comes Back
They told me to walk three blocks north and turn left. Then walk half a block and, on the east side of the street and half-hidden by the branches of a magnolia tree, I would find a sign for the bus...
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Death and Jealousy: Q&A with Strindberg Translator Paul Walsh
Paul Walsh On the occasion of the centennial of Swedish writer August Strindberg’s death, San Francisco’s Cutting Ball Theater will be performing all five of Strindberg’s Chamber Plays (Storm, Burned...
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Mythical and Spiritual, Direct and Concrete: The Storytelling Prowess of Sjón
Three novels from acclaimed Icelandic author Sjón are now available in the United States. Translated by Victoria Cribb, each book offers a vastly different story, beginning with simple and intense...
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Significant as Medieval Texts, They’re Bawdy and Lively, Too: ‘The Fabliaux’
Nathaniel E. Dubin’s collection of Old French comic tales in translation, The Fabliaux, is as deceptive as one of the fabliaux themselves. Published by Liveright, an imprint of Norton, in a sumptuous...
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A Drink from the Pitcher Like a Drink from the Spring: Q&A with Riccardo Duranti
Riccardo Duranti and his granddaughter at his family farm in the hills of Sabina, Italy. Riccardo Duranti is perhaps best known for being one of the select people in the world to have translated all of...
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A Will to Live: ‘Hotel Silence’ by Audur Ava Olafsdóttir
Icelandic novelist, playwright, and poet Audur Ava Olafsdóttir offers a bizarrely lighthearted and humorous—yet nonetheless moving—portrayal of suicide and post-war life in her latest novel, Hotel...
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Takeoffs and Landings: ‘Blue Self-Portrait’ by Noémi Lefebvre
Air travel has long been depicted in fiction as a venue for potential transition and transformation (even if only metaphorical); we take off from one place and land in another, and there is no...
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The Psychic Toll: ‘Moon Brow’ by Shahriar Mandanipour
A quick summary of Moon Brow (464 pages; Restless Books; translated by Sara Khalili), Shahriar Mandanipour’s newest novel to be translated into English, reads like the stuff of fable. Our main...
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A Most Unlikely Heroine: ‘The Story of H’ by Marina Perezagua
Marina Perezagua’s masterfully written novel The Story of H (281 pages; Ecco/HarperCollins: translated by Valerie Miles) follows the agonizing lifelong journey of an unlikely heroine, H, an intersex...
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‘The Wind That Lays Waste’ by Selva Almada: A Long and Humid Afternoon
A devoted man of God and his sullen teenage daughter are on the road to a church in a remote village when their car breaks down. They soon find themselves at the mercy of a grizzled mechanic who has...
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