Beartown shows a different side to the writing capability of Frederik Backman. It still features community as a large character, but in this case we are speaking about a community larger than the ones his books have inhabited before. The story line is more complicated and there are more moving parts. Subject matter too, is darker, …
Charif Majdalani’s Moving the Palace is a modern tribute to the ancient art of storytelling. Imparting all the wonders of travel through exotic lands without any colonialist condescension, it’s a pure pleasure to read. –James Crossley, Island Books, Mercer Island, WA Get your summer armchair travel lined up at Island Books and other local, independent …
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 …
Whether The Story of Hong Gildong is the oldest extant Korean prose fiction or the second oldest, whether it was written by poet and statesman Heo Gyun (1569-1618) about a real bandit or whether it’s popular fiction by an anonymous commoner in the second half of the 19th century matters greatly to some. Not so …
“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, …
The sky is a perfect, cloudless azure, it’s 32 degrees Celsius, and I’m on a Mediterranean beach with sand as fine as confectioner’s sugar. Which is lovely, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t have sunglasses with me and the glare off the white page is enough to melt the eyeballs of the most dauntless …
The din of South African vuvuzelas has barely died away, yet here it is again—the World Cup. For the next month the finest soccer teams in the world will meet on Brazilian pitches, eliminating each other one by one until a final champion is crowned. As always, it promises to be a fascinating pageant, whether …
