Nine Continents, A Memoir in and Out of China, by Xiaolu Guo

(2018).
Xiaolo Guo has ridden the brutal waves of twentieth-century Chinese history in which individual lives are engulfed by the State. Growing up in 1970-1980s Chine, she tellingly says of these years that we never used the word, “love.” In this vivid memoir, winner of he NBCC award for autobiography, Xiaolu…

Read more

The Ruined House by Ruby Namdar & Translator Hillel Halkin

Contemporary Fiction, Dalkey Press (Spring 2018).
If Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud set in motion debates about Jewish traditions in America, Ruby Namdar sustains them in his new novel, The Ruined House. But his novel is in dialogue not only with these writers but, more importantly, the sacred Jewish texts of the ancient world…

Read more

Swallowing Mercury by Wioletta Greg & Translator Eliza Marciniak

(2017).
Everyone in this enchanting novella whispers or sings something under his or her breath. A girl, Wiola, comes of age in the last decade of communist Poland, 1970-1980, in the small village of Herkaty hearing whispers, both political and personal. She hears her father, a deserter from the army, return…

Read more

Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches and Interviews, ed. Allan Hepburn

Journal of Modern Literature 35:2, 139-142 (Winter 2012).
If Elizabeth Bowen is a writer with whom we have to "catch up," Allan Hepburn's recent collections of her unpublished work will help us along that path. Bowen was a regular contibutor to the BBC from 1941-1973. And though Bowen is known mainly as an Anglo-Irish short story writer and…

Read more

Modernism and the Museum by Rupert Arrowsmith

Modernism/Modernity (May 2012).
The radical change in London's artists and writers in the years leading up to World War I can best be seen, Rpert Arrowsmith argues, as "an unprecendeted engagement and dialogue between tadition and the rest of the world." Yet the histories and literary and artistic studies of the period have…

Read more

Shape Shifter: An Interview with Metis Publisher & Muge Sokman, Istanbul

Riverrun (April 17, 2011).
“Aren’t you afraid?” was the question posed to Muge Sukman, co-founder of Metis, one of the leading independent publishers of fiction and non-fiction in Turkey in 2005. Orhan Pamuk had just been threatened with imprisonment for “insulting Turkishness” in remarks he made about the killing of Armenians in a CNN…

Read more

Kapitoil: A Novel by Teddy Wayne

Contemporary Review of Fiction, September (2010).
Teddy Wayne like James Joyce plays freely with the grammatical infelicities of the English language in his engaging first novel... Teddy Wayne, Kapitoil, Harper Perennial (2009)

Read more

O Fallen Angel by Kate Zambreno

Contemporary Review of Fiction (2010).
Kate Zambreno had written a literary triptych on the altar of modern American suburban life: "it's the American way the nuclear family and the nuclear bomb the white picket fence"..... Kate Zambreno, O Fallen Angel, Harper Collins (2019) Buy on Amazon:

Read more

Locating Woolf: the Politics of Place and Space by Anna Snaith & Micharl Whitworth

English Literature in Transition 52:3, 122-125 (2009).
Nothing can happen nowhere, asserts Elizabeth Bowen. This collection of essays attempts to locate the "where" of Woolf's stories and novels, asserting that the inner landscape of her writing has been overemphasized by critis. This postmodern turn is to locate her writing in material, national, imperial, global and geographic "space"…

Read more

Modernism and the Culture of Market Society, by John Xiros Cooper

English Literature in Transition 48: 3 (2005).
JOHN XIROS COOPER claims that the modernists of 1920s-1930s were "the first cells of a new kind of social organization" that would spread the "nihilism" of market culture by century's end. Arguing against Andreas Huyssens's theory of the Great Divide between the avant-garde and mass-market society, Cooper holds responsible various…

Read more

Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson: Common Readers by Beth Carole Rosenberg

English Literature in Transition 39:3, 380-383 (1996).
Beth Carole Rosenberg argues that Samuel Johnson and Vriginia Woolf are in dialogue, and that this relation has been ignored in Woolf criticism Applying a paradigm of dialogic relations as developed by the Russian formalist, Mikhail Bakhtin, she isolates Johnson's influence in this densely argued book. Beth Carole Rosenberg, Virginia…

Read more

Search

Powered by CouchCMS