Published by Penguin Random House, 2016, 208 pages. A woman in a hospital in New York turns from the window to find her estranged mother sitting by her bed. Over the next five days they talk, remembering people they both knew and reestablishing forgotten connections. Then as abruptly as she came, the mother leaves. The …
Women Travellers Tell their Stories
Think of all the travel books that you have read: how many of them are written by men? Almost all? And yet women have been travelling and writing about it for as long as men. As a reviewer for the website, Women on the Road, I have spent the last few years reading these books. …
City on Fire: Garth Risk Hallberg
Published by Knopf, 2015, 944 pages. An ambitious debut, City on Fire paints a portrait of New York in the 60s and 70s, following a group of people as they try to make (or unmake) their lives in the city. The book begins during Christmas 1976/New Year 1977. It is the time of punk and …
Listening to the Writer’s Voice
I'm looking at close to half an hour of standing over the stove, staring into a pot as I stir, maybe stepping away for a few seconds at a time to check on this or that, open the refrigerator and put something away, or just look out the window. I block out the impatient honks …
Paper Towns: John Green
Published by Bloomsbury / Dutton Books, 2008, 320 pages. “The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. … My miracle was this: in all the houses of all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.” The book is narrated by Quentin Jacobsen, a 17-year-old close …
Des ailes au loin: Jadd Hilal
Published by Elyzad, 2018, 216 pages. Loosely translated as Away on Wings, this is a story of four generations of Palestinian-Lebanese women for whom migration becomes a way of life. For the moment, it is available only in French, but there is a good chance that it will be translated into English. The book is …
The Golden House: Salman Rushdie
Published by Random House, 2017, 380 pages. The 2000 elections in the US are underway. A man and his three adult sons move to New York from an unnamed city in an unnamed country. Armed with new, classical names—Julius Nero Golden and his sons Petronicus or Petya, Lucius Apuleius or Apu (a nod to his …
No sweet song, this
Lullaby by Leila Slimani translated from the French by Sam Taylor Published by Faber & Faber, 2017, 224 pages. Original version published in 2016. Review by Usha Raman I encountered Leila Slimani and her work in the New York Times Review of Books, months before the English translation came to market. My fingers raced across the …
Are book reviews important?
Given the content of this blog, it's pretty clear where I stand on this. But there are writers who question the point of a book review and can be scathing about reviewers. In this article in The New Statesman, Chris Power defends the point of the review. "Reviews don’t matter. 'I never really trust reviews,' …
Recognizing the Talent of the Translator: The Subtle Art of Translating
From time to time, this blog showcases books in translation to tempt readers to explore writing from countries that do not always make it to the bestseller lists. But we often overlook the work of the translator, who has not only to be fluent in two languages but has to be able to write. The …
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