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 [...]

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 [...]

Commedia dell’arte performers doing their thing in the HTC world premiere production of “The Miracle at Naples.”

The Miracle at Naples, a new comedy by David Grimm. Directed by Peter DuBois. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, through May 9, 2009.
Reviewed by Bill [...]

by Bill Marx

“The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all of our discriminations should curve toward that end.”
Along with compliments to the late John Updike’s fiction, poetry, and writings on golf, a few hosannas to his literary criticism popped up, though [...]

By Bill Marx

First, I want to mention a couple of volumes that I unaccountably left off my World Books 2008 round-up of the best fiction and non-fiction candidates. No, it is not another salute to the current international fiction daring Roberto Bolaño, a fever fanned by the appearance of his huge tome “2666″ in English. [...]

by Bill Marx
“Writing in the Dark”
By David Grossman. Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen
Farrar, Straus Giroux, 131 pages, $18

Israeli novelist David Grossman fears his country is losing its soul.
In this stirring but slim collection essays on the intersection of politics and literature by celebrated Israeli novelist David (”See Under: Love,” “Her Body Knows”) [...]

By Bill Marx
Earlier this month, Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, stoked up the cultural consternation machine when he implied that American writers are too provincial to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. American literary life is “too isolated, too insular” he opines, its writers don’t translate particularly well and they aren’t players [...]

By Bill Marx

Novelist and critic Dubravka Ugresic
On this week’s World Books podcast I talk to novelist and cultural critic Dubravka Ugresic about her latest volume of trenchant essays and commentaries, “Nobody’s Home” (Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac). My conversation with Ugresic circles around her contention that, despite European enthusiasm for culture, the [...]

By Bill Marx
In his conversation with me for the World Books podcast, Irish novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry insists that, unlike imaginative writers in Eastern Europe, who seem to have dried up after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Irish authors are making good use of their recent freedom to talk about the corruption of [...]

by Bill Marx
“If Borges is the writer who made Garcia Marquez possible,” observed Salman Rushdie, “then it is no exaggeration to say that Machado de Assis is the writer who made Borges possible.” Rushdie’s piggybacked history of the hemisphere’s premier intellectual ironists is correct but, at least until the last decade or so, Machado was [...]