Trevor Berrett It’s time my kids got back to work and did a review. Up this time, one of our favorites, James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks (1950). The lovely hardcover New York Review Children’s Collection contains the original illustrations by Marc Simont, who died last year, and really it is just the kind of book to read … Read more
Trevor and Betsy discuss Alice Munro’s “Age of Faith,” from Lives of Girls and Women.
I missed it earlier this week, but the finalists for The Story Prize were announced (see here for the official announcement). Archangel, by Andrea Barrett Bobcat, by Rebecca Lee Tenth of December, by George Saunders My vote goes to Archangel, by Andrea Barrett. Though I should admit I have not read the entirety of any of these … Read more
The Cahiers Series is swiftly becoming my favorite place to look for small explorations. At its center, the series is set up to explore translation, but, as publisher Ornan Rotem said (here), “[translation] understood in very broad terms; that is to say, not only as the transition from one natural language to another, but also … Read more
One day the scholar/poet A.K. Ramanujan was sifting through stacks of uncatalogued books in University of Chicago’s library. He stumbled upon an anthology of around 400 classical Tamil poems that deal with love and separation, the Kuruntokai. The Kuruntokai itself is a part of a larger work, the Ettutokai, which consists of 2,371 poems by around … Read more
Today the NBCC announced their finalists. Fiction: Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Someone, by Alice McDermott The Infatuations, by Javier Marías (my review here) A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt Nonfiction: Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt that Brought Him to Justice, by Kevin … Read more
Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. Akhil Sharma’s “A Mistake” was originally published in the January 20, 2014 issue of The New Yorker. Betsy “A Mistake,” by Akhil Sharma, is, according to the Page-Turner interview with Deborah Treisman, the fictional account of an event that really happened to … Read more
Despite considering myself a fan of Stefan Zweig’s emotionally turbulent stories since I read his novella Chess Story back in 2008 (my thoughts here, in one of my first posts on this blog), until recently I had no idea he wrote Letter from an Unknown Woman (Brief einer Unbekannten, 1922; tr. from the German by Anthea Bell, 2013). I … Read more
After learning that this book is an absurdist satire with its sights set on the modernization of Turkey, I was nervous it would be unreadable for me. After all, I know very little about Kemal Atatürk and the modernization of Turkey, and what I do know has been told to me by others who, like … Read more
Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Dinaw Mengestu’s “The Paper Revolution” was originally published in the January 13, 2014 issue of The New Yorker. Trevor The last (and only) thing I read by Mengestu was “An Honest Exit” (my thoughts … Read more