Saturday, July 31, 2021

Shokoofeh Azar's THE ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE GREENGAGE TREE (tr. by Anonymous)

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  There's a scene towards the middle of Shokoofeh Azar's surreal Iranian tragedy, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree , in which...
Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Best Translated Book Nominees: Ma Jian's CHINA DREAM (Translated by Flora Drew)

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I never could have imagined Billy Pilgrim* as a moderately powerful bureaucrat in 21st Century People's Republic of China, but Ma Jian s...
Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Best Translated Book Nominees : Sinan Antoon's THE BOOK OF COLLATERAL DAMAGE (translated by Jonathan Wright)

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Bearing the title that it does, The Book of Collateral Damage  cannot be expected to be a lighthearted and cheery read, but let's take a...
Thursday, June 11, 2020

Rosemary Sullivan's STALIN'S DAUGHTER: THE EXTRAORDINARY AND TUMULTUOUS LIFE OF SVETLANA ALLELUYEVA

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Some people have unbelievably strange lives, and then there's Svetlana Alleluyeva, aka Svetlana Dzhukashvilli, aka Lana Peters, aka... b...
Wednesday, June 3, 2020

Best Translated Book Nominees: Burhan Sönmez' LABYRINTH: A NOVEL (Translated by Ummit Hussein)

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I've never been less certain that the people who wrote the jacket copy for a novel read the same book that I did than in the case of Lab...
Friday, May 29, 2020

Hilary Mantel's THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT

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History is always a spoiler for historical fiction, so I knew, as the virtual pages of The Mirror and the Light dwindled, that I was about ...

Best Translated Book Nominees: Donatella Di Pietrantonio's A GIRL RETURNED, Translated by Ann Goldsmith

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I understand it's a fairly common fantasy among children, to imagine (usually when they're angry with their families) that their par...