From Phinney Books in Seattle, WA: For a long time, we’ve been admirers of Persephone Books, both for the distinctive gray elegance of the books they publish and for the books themselves, which are by just the sort of semi-neglected writers we love to find. Tom visited their shop in London before they moved to …
Domenico Starnone’s Ties is an expertly crafted short novel that is charmingly intimate, disarmingly chatty and laced with some walloping surprises. Its Italian publication so captivated Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri (whose memoir In Other Words documents her study of Italian) that she translated the novel into English, and superbly so. The novel is a meditation on love–what is …
2016 was already a pretty weird year, but last week a few people in Stockholm found a way to take it over the top. As you’ve probably heard by now, the Swedish Academy awarded Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature, citing him for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” …
“Prefer a Brazilian? “As you may have guessed, this is a gritty novel with violence at its core. Surrounding that core, however, is a rich and engrossing narrative that is funny, sexy, enigmatic, and escapist. This novel is a fulminent introduction to one of today’s most gifted Brazilian writers.” –Jamil Zaidi, Elliott Bay Book Company, …
