Published by Vintage / Crown, 2012, 414 pages. Published in the US as The Black Count—Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo We know Alexandre Dumas’s novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, as a work of fiction. But he based a lot of it on the life of his father, also Alexandre …
Author: suroor alikhan
I have always been an avid reader. I read across genres and try and find books by writers from countries around the world. One of the things I love is talking to fellow readers about books!
The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka: Josef Skvorecky
Translated from Czech by Rosemary Kavan, Kaca Polackova and George TheinerPublished by Faber & Faber / W. W. Norton & Company, 1973, 288 pages. Original version published in 1966. Meet Lieutenant Boruvka of the Czechoslovak police: a rotund man with baby blue eyes, a tuft of hair on top of his head, and a mournful …
Continue reading The Mournful Demeanour of Lieutenant Boruvka: Josef Skvorecky
By Night the Mountain Burns: Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel
Translated from Spanish by Jethro SoutarPublished by And Other Stories, 2014, 275 pages. Original version published in 2008. “[F]or our island was all alone at sea and there was no other land we could join forces with to combat our lack of everything. It was around then that I realised we islanders had no one …
Continue reading By Night the Mountain Burns: Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel
Le Pays sans ombre: Abdourahman A. Waberi
Published by Motifs / Le Serpent à Plumes, 1994, 177 pages. Published in English as The Land without Shadows, University of Virginia Press, 2005. Translated from French by Jeanne Garane. A man forgets his own language and finds himself speaking Creole; a young woman runs away from her village to escape an arranged marriage to …
Ladies’ Tailor: Priya Hajela
Published by Harper Collins, 2022, 295 pages. “The people, the smells, the voices, the yearning, the hands clutching bellies—for that’s where their few precious belongings were—the odour of fear, the taste of dislocation, the sounds of desperation: that is what Gurdev sensed all around him when they reached Lahore station.” In 1947, when India was …
Combining Languages and Images: An Interview with Slavko Milekić
Self portrait by Slavko Milekić Slavko Milekić is a Serbian author, artist, translator and neuropsychologist, who now lives in Mexico. His books include Word Beads (2019), a collection of short stories, which he also illustrated; and The Theory of Language (1999), which he cowrote with Steven Weisler. Slavko teaches Cognitive Science and Digital Design at …
Continue reading Combining Languages and Images: An Interview with Slavko Milekić
A Little Luck: Claudia Piñeiro
Translated from Spanish by Frances RiddlePublished by Charco Press, 2023, 210 pages. Original version published in 2015. “It takes so many words to recount events that occur in a matter of minutes, seconds, fractions of time that are barely perceptible. Things happen so quickly that the words needed to describe them are never able to …
Three Apples Fell from the Sky: Narine Abgaryan
Translated from Russian by Lisa C. HaydenPublished by Oneworld Publications, 2020, 255 pages. Original version published in 2014. One Friday, Anatolia Sevoyants put her affairs in order and lay down to breathe her last. She had been bleeding heavily for days, although her periods had stopped some years ago, and she was convinced she was …
Continue reading Three Apples Fell from the Sky: Narine Abgaryan
A Brief History of Seven Killings: Marlon James
Published by OneWorld, 2014, 688 pages. “If it no go so, it go near so.” “[E]ven though the Singer is the center of the story, it really isn’t his story. Like there’s a version of this story that’s not really about him, but about the people around him, the ones who come and go that …
Continue reading A Brief History of Seven Killings: Marlon James
Looking back at a decade of Talking About Books
Photo: bee boys via Shutterstock A decade ago, the first post went up on Talking About Books, announcing its arrival. The first review followed soon after, exactly 10 years ago today.[1] This post is a way of taking stock of the journey and of thanking the people who have been part of it. When I …
Continue reading Looking back at a decade of Talking About Books
Talking About Books 