Translated from Spanish by Gregory RabassaPublished by Phoenix, 1999, 245 pages. Original version published in 1992. “[L]isten carefully, because I hold its whole history in the secret places of my memory.” Doña Inés, the matriarch of a wealthy Venezuelan family who owns a cacao plantation, fights a legal battle with her houseboy for some property …
Continue reading Doña Inés Versus Oblivion: Ana Teresa Torres
Published by Back Bay Books, 2004, 294 pages. “When a child is born in Tahiti, her placenta is buried under a tree and the child and the tree grow together. A healthy tree means a healthy child just as a sick tree means a sick child.” Set in Tahiti, this book is about the relationship …
Translated from German by Katharina RoutPublished by Milkweed Editions, 2006, 209 pages. Original version published in 1994. “Grandma was human silk. That’s what Father said, and what he said was always right. Always. And she had been sent to me by the sky.” The Blue Sky is a coming-of-age story about a boy living in …
Published by Fourth Estate/Harper Collins, 2022, 491 pages. “Not everything the light touches can be seen.” “‘To strive, to seek, to find, dear Evie,’, her grandmother would sing, ‘and never to yield.’“‘Never to yield to what?’ she would ask. ...“‘A life bereft of wonder.’” Four people, separated by time and place, embarking on four journeys, …
Continue reading Everything the Light Touches–A Novel: Janice Pariat
Photo: Triff via Shutterstock A young girl runs away to search for the illegitimate child she has had to give up. A boy leaves his family to look for his older brother. A woman tries to build bridges with her estranged son. A man tries to make sense of his younger brother’s death. When I …
Translated from Russian by George BirdPublished by Vintage Books, 2003, 228 pages. Original version published in 1996. Victor lives in Kyiv with his pet penguin, Misha, whom he acquired when the local zoo was giving away animals they could no longer feed. Viktor makes a living writing obituaries (obelisks) for the newspaper Capital News. His …
Published by Hodder & Stoughton, and Anchor, 1977, 497 pages. “Now his ears were open and he could hear them again, the gathering, ghosts or spirits or maybe the hotel itself, a dreadful funhouse where all the sideshows ended in death... It was a living sound, but not voices, not breath. ... [T]o Danny it …
Translated from Spanish by Fionn PetchPublished by Charco Press, 2017, 97 pages. Original version published in 2011. “Ever since people raised their heads for the first time to observe the stars and began telling them apart by nothing more than the invisible threads of frozen silver that link them, they also began to tell stories.” …
Davina Quinlivan is a British writer and lecturer. Her book Shalimar: A Story of Place and Migration is a mix of memoir, travel and nature writing. Davina is a lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, and Writer in Residence with Literature Works/Quay Words and the Royal Devon …
Continue reading Exploring Memory: An Interview with Davina Quinlivan
Published by Penguin, 2022, 512 pages. Two girls grow up together in 1920s British Malaya: Ella, the daughter of the English owner of a tin mine and his Malayan wife, and Noor, the daughter of the family’s cook. The girls are inseparable, even though Ella’s mother does not seem to approve. The girls swear a …
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