By Bill Marx
Much new material since the October update for those with an interest in international literature.
My latest podcast features an interview with journalist and author Justine Hardy, whose latest book (published by the Free Press), “In the Valley of Mist: One Family in a Changing World,” continues her exploration of life in Kashmir, [...]

By Bill Marx
You want a racy, nineteenth-century epic about sex, sin, drugs, and prostitution set in China? Here it is.

Two more pieces on international fiction for World Books, the feature I edit for PRI’s The World.
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By Bill Marx
Sigmund Freud sets out a weirdly Brobdingnagian survival scenario for kids. Young children rely on their parents, dependent on the intimidating bounty and emotional whims of “adult” giants who could easily dish out too much smothering love or unconscious hostility.
Novelist Peter Stephan Jungk weaves a playfully tragicomic variation on this primal generational [...]

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 [...]

By Caldwell Titcomb
Back for a return visit to Symphony Hall on April 22 was the National Philharmonic of Russia (NPR), founded in 2003 and not to be confused with the 19-year-old Russian National Orchestra. On the podium for this Celebrity Series event was violin virtuoso Vladimir Spivakov, who will turn 65 in September and is [...]

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 [...]