In Translation

‘Bad for Business’

In Harsh Times, Mario Vargas Llosa grieves for the path Guatemala might have taken had the United States and the United Fruit Company not intervened in 1954 to overthrow the reformist president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán.

February 23, 2023 issue

Gary Saul Morson

Living Outside of Time

In Eugene Vodolazkin’s polyphonic novels, the past addresses historians to come, time seems to repeat itself, and the future brings a fundamental change in temporality.

January 19, 2023 issue

Natalia Ginzburg and Alba de Céspedes

On Women: An Exchange

“That article of mine spoke of women in general, and said things we all know: that women are not much worse than men and can also accomplish something worthwhile if they try.”

December 22, 2022 issue

Nathaniel Rich

Houses of Holes

Hiroko Oyamada’s novels inhabit the borderlands between fantasy and reality, an uncanny landscape played for horror and comedy.

December 22, 2022 issue

Audrey Wollen

The Circuitous Sublime

Like most hauntings, Fleur Jaeggy’s books are often quite baroque, but they cast a strange spell that causes everyone to remember them as nothing but austere.

December 8, 2022 issue

Nathaniel Rich

‘The Italian Proust’

Italo Svevo’s late fiction has all the dark irony, self-flagellating introspection, manic obsessiveness, and unapologetic moral perversity of his best-known work.

August 24, 2022

J.W. McCormack

Kafka’s Inkblots

What can be read in the trove of sketches and doodles saved by Franz Kafka’s literary executor?

July 19, 2022

Tim Parks

The Visible Translator

The task of rendering a writer’s work in a different language used to be a vocation largely requiring self-effacement in favor of the text. That is changing.

March 31, 2021

The Latest

Tim Parks

DeepL Edizioni

As machine translation software grows more sophisticated, could it entirely replace human translators?

March 22, 2023

Frances Wilson

Descriptions of a Struggle

Kafka’s diaries—made up of false starts, stray thoughts, self-doubts, internal dialogues, dreams, doodles, aphorisms, drafts of stories, character sketches, and scenes from family life—are often very funny.

April 6, 2023 issue

Alejandro Chacoff

The Unbearable Weight of Levity

In Clarice Lispector’s newspaper columns and crônicas, she seems sensorially overcharged by the quotidian, needing only the tiniest slice of existence to feed her writing.

April 6, 2023 issue

Gary Saul Morson

The Master of Toska

Janet Malcolm called Chekhov’s work “a kind of exercise in withholding.” A new book traces the development of his mastery to two crucial years.

April 6, 2023 issue

Anjum Hasan

Endless Trances

With a wordy, inventive style, in Tomb of Sand the Hindi writer Geetanjali Shree lets language take the lead.

March 23, 2023 issue

Natasha Wimmer

The Friction of Language

The novelist Yoko Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and German, often makes translation one of her central themes.

March 9, 2023 issue

Ben Lerner

The Faces of Victor Serge

The radical writer’s novels are unsettling explorations of the tension between individual and collective life.

January 19, 2023 issue

Ange Mlinko

The Transplanted Ironist

Iman Mersal’s feminism manifests not as a creed but as a tone, a disposition toward life and love.

December 22, 2022 issue

Howard W. French

Naipaul’s Unreal Africa

A Bend in the River was acclaimed for its brave truth-telling, but it fails to imagine Africa as anything other than unchanging, untamed, and primitive.

December 22, 2022 issue