By Bill Marx
Saudi Arabian author Abdo Khal won the $60,000 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Arab Booker) for his novel Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles, which is also known as She Throws Sparks.
Taleb Alrefai, who served as chair for this year’s panel of judges, said, “The winning novel is a brilliant exploration [...]

By Bill Marx
In the latest World Books podcast I talk to Robert Chandler, who along with his wife Elizabeth and Olga Meerson has translated Andrey Platonov’s novel “The Foundation Pit” for New York Review Books.
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By Liao Yiwu, Wen Huang, and Bill Marx
Each time a disaster hits China, we all become refugees and strangers in our own land. — Liao Yiwu

Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, 50, revisits the earthquake damaged Gu Temple in the town of Jiezi in the Sichuan Province. He was interviewing May 12th survivors for his book “The [...]

Sometimes I wonder if Euripides saw the very texture of reality as ironic. Saw the gods in their interactions with human beings as essentially playing. A frightening idea. But at least it entails the assumption that Euripides himself was not playing. Anne Carson, in her introduction to her translation of Euripides’ “Orestes” in “An Oresteia.”

Melissa [...]

Widening literary perspectives is admirable, but as the festival matures somebody at PEN has to decide what World Voices is supposed to be.

By Bill Marx
My admittedly small sampling of the 5th Anniversary of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in New York last week left me feeling baffled. I attended seven [...]

An erudite, absorbing, and often very funny account of Russia’s pathological inability to condemn the Communist Party.
Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia
By Jonathan Brent
Atlas & Co. Publishers, 335 pages
Reviewed by Anna Razumnaya

A certain jealous vigilance is to be expected when a Russian reads a book about Russia written by an American. I first [...]

A brilliant Dutch novel that explores the connections to the disconnected.

The Twin By Gerbrand Bakker
Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer. Archipelago Books, 343 pages.
Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

It isn’t easy to write a compelling novel about loneliness, for the simple reason that loneliness is boring. It makes for something of a paradox: the feeling [...]

Charlotte Roche is one of the most famous authors in Germany. Thomas Mann must be spinning in his grave.
Wetlands By Charlotte Roche. Translated from the German by Tim Mohr. Grove Press, 240 pages.
Reviewed by Tommy Wallach

On the subject of literary criticism, Martin Amis has written that “quotation is the reviewer’s only [...]

An assured novel that celebrates, with considerable stylistic facility, an extraordinary engagement with the history of literature.
Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto
Translated from Spanish by Esther Allen. Grove Press, 288 pages
Reviewed by Alexander Nemser

Jose Manuel Prieto’s “Rex” is an adventure through time: not historical time, or physical time, so much as literary [...]

Brazilian writer Nelson Rodrigues — a master at evoking the humor and pathos of out-of-control libidos.
Life As It Is: Selected Stories
By Nelson Rodrigues. Translated from the Portuguese by Alex Ladd. Host Publications, 314 pages
Reviewed by Bill Marx
No nonsense British philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously described man’s life as it is as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and [...]