The Underground Railroad published by Doubleday / Random House, 2016, 320 pages.Killers of the Flower Moon published by Random House, 2016, 352 pages.Review by Usha Raman Strange fruit—the title of a song by Billie Holliday that's been playing on my car stereo, and I can't get it out of my mind...nor can I get the images …
Paradise of the Blind: Duong Thu Huang
Translated from Vietnamese by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPhersonPublished by Penguin / William Morrow Paperbacks, 1993, 274 pages. Original version published in 1988. It seems like a lot of the stories about Viet Nam are about the war, and that too from the American perspective. The country itself seems to disappear, merely providing a …
Kaveena: Boubacar Boris Diop
Translated from French by Bhakti Shringarpure and Sara C. HanaburghPublished by Indiana University Press, 2016, 246 pages. Original version published in 2006. This novel is set in an unnamed African country and starts against a backdrop of civil unrest. The head of the secret service, Col. Asante Kroma, is looking for the deposed president, N’Zo …
Tales from the Kathasaritsagara: Somadeva
Translated from Sanskrit by Arshia SattarPublished by Penguin, 1996, 320 pages. The original stories were written between 1063 to 1081. Kathasaritsagara can be translated as the “ocean of the sea of stories”. This is the mother lode of stories, composed by Somadeva around 1070 CE for the Kashmiri queen, Suryavati. But many of these had …
The Pledge: Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Translated from German by Joel AgeePublished by University of Chicago Press / Pushkin Vertigo, 1959, 192 pages. Original version published in 1958. The book starts with the narrator travelling to Chur in Switzerland to give a lecture on the art of writing detective stories. The talk is not a success, and the writer meets Dr. …
Of Love and Other Demons: Gabriel García Márquez
Published by Penguin / Vintage, 1995, 160 pages. Original version published in 1994.Translated from Spanish by Edith GrossmanReview by Thomas Peak Once, under a stifling October sun, Gabriel García Márquez, the great Latin American writer, observed the unceremonious wrenching open of a centuries-old tomb. As the sacred stones were smashed into rubble, bundles of luminescent golden …
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On Writing—A Memoir of the Craft: Stephen King
Published by Scribner, 2000, 320 pages. This book on writing starts with two contradictory epigraphs: “Honesty is the best policy” and “Liars prosper”. Good fiction is a mix of the two. Writers invent, but also draw upon what they know. This book is far more than a primer on writing well. Stephen King starts and …
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Zig-zagging around the world
The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated from Korean by Deborah Smith / The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, translated from Swedish by Thomas Teal / The Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak / The Black Box by Alek Popov, translated from Bulgarian by Daniella and Charles Edward Gill de Mayol de LupePublishing details belowReview …
Brick Lane: Monica Ali
Published by Doubleday / Black Swan, 2003, 416 pages. A portrait of the Bangladeshi community in London, Brick Lane follows Nazneen, a young girl from a village in Bangladesh who is married off to Chanu, an older Bangladeshi man, and moves with him to the UK. During her early years in London, Nazneen’s world is …
Minae Mizumura on the Hegemony of English: from The Claremont Review of Books
Mark A. Heberle reviews Minae Mizumura's The Fall of English, which looks at how English dominates not only science and the internet, but also publishing, and what this means for other languages, especially Japanese. To quote from the article: "This powerful, insightful work analyzes the predicament of world languages and literatures in an age when …
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Talking About Books 