Killing Commendatore
Once you get past the requisite hosannas, and they're ample for a writer of Harukli Murakmi's rank, his sprawling new [...]
A chilling kind of convenience
Novelist Sakaya Murato's "Convenience Store Woman" (Portobello Books, 2018), a huge Japanese hit only recently translated into English, has quickly [...]
The Linden Tree
This pensive little memoir by the Argentine fantasist César Aria deals with remembrance as a child might handle a hamster, [...]
Kudos for Cusk
Rachel Cusk’s recent “Kudos” closes a brilliant trilogy of novels —beginning with 2014’s “Outline”— that was dubbed “Faye” by some, [...]
Is Less the new more?
In San Francisco, "mid-level novelist" Arthur Less nears his landmark 50th birthday. Simultaneously, his young lover Freddy announces he’s getting [...]
The Emissary
Set in a future Japan that along with the rest of the planet has endured a soil-sickening eco-environmental catastrophe, Yoko [...]
Denis Johnson’s last largesse
Nighttime, a man wakes, dons a robe. Barefoot, he wanders the silent neighborhood. Perhaps he'll encounter "a magic sword… a [...]
A Girl in Exile: Requiem for Linda B.
Albanian playwright Rudian Stefa sees ghosts. They are both mythical, a byproduct of his love of Greek literature, and "real," [...]
Eco’s populist prophesy
The populist right's global political surge has led Italian publisher La nave di Teseo to reprint the English translation of [...]
Barnes on “Love”
In the 1960s, a youth and a married woman take a chance on madcap love. The result pitches tent between passion and melancholy.