In Translation

Of Crocodiles and Kings

Tony K. Stewart’s new translation of centuries-old Bengali stories reveals their rich and varied sources, including The Thousand and One Nights.

May 11, 2023 issue

Michael Hofmann

Bewitched by Goethe

In Johann Eckermann, Goethe found an amanuensis made in heaven.

May 25, 2023 issue

Larry Rohter

The Inventor of Magical Realism

It remains a mystery why Miguel Ángel Asturias’s brilliant novel Mr. President remains less well known in the English-speaking world than the many novels it inspired.

May 25, 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

Ruth Margalit

Writing the Nakba in Hebrew

Arabesques is Anton Shammas’s lament for the catastrophe of 1948 and his paean to Hebrew and Arabic, languages he has spent a lifetime navigating between.

April 20, 2023 issue

Vivian Gornick

Surviving by Accident

With neither cynicism nor sentimentality, Marina Jarre makes us feel the hard, dull ache of the spiritual aloneness that countless lives endure, especially in the shadow of a dramatic world war.

June 8, 2023 issue

Ariel Dorfman

A Profusion of Poets

In Chilean Poet, Alejandro Zambra goes beyond his habitual minimalism to portray the chaotic commotion of today’s Chile.

May 11, 2023 issue

Nicole Rudick

Les Enfants Terribles

In Anne Garréta’s novels, her playful forms are the means of exploring and elucidating ideas about gender, consciousness, and memory.

May 11, 2023 issue

The Latest

Jennifer Wilson

Mother Russia

In Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s latest novel, Kidnapped, Soviet bureaucracy is made all the messier by maternal desperation.

October 5, 2023 issue

Larry Rohter

Searching for the True Brazil

The writer Mário de Andrade advocated a lusty embrace of the indigenous elements of Brazilian culture.

October 5, 2023 issue

A.E. Stallings

‘Obedient to Their Words’

As a writer who is so obviously a real person, Simonides perhaps more than any other ancient poet attracts anecdotes and stories that reflect on his character as much as his work.

October 5, 2023 issue

Anahid Nersessian

Poems to Wake the Corpses

Joyce Mansour, the Syrian-Jewish writer whom André Breton called “the greatest poet of our time,” is the latest female member of the Surrealist circle to be reintroduced to the public.

September 21, 2023 issue

Justin Davidson

Growing Up on Moan Street

The Naples of Domenico Starnone’s novel The House on Via Gemito is a hot-breathed, dragonlike city that keeps its children bound even after they escape.

September 21, 2023 issue

Adam Thirlwell

The Trouble with Truth

Emmanuel Carrère’s Yoga is his latest variation on the idea that humans live on an edge, a border beyond which life can be emptied of all meaning.

July 20, 2023 issue

Anahid Nersessian

The Republic of Translation

Two new translations of poetry travel from ancient Sardinia to modern Paris.

July 20, 2023 issue

Joshua Cohen

The Imps of His Age

In a harrowing, witty novel by Miroslav Krleža, written in Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II, a mediocre lawyer succumbs to the impetus to speak against all reason.

June 6, 2023

Rachel Donadio

Escaping Biography

Nathalie Sarraute sought to free the novel from old narrative conventions and refused to admit the relevance of her own experience—as a woman, as a Jew—to her writing.

June 22, 2023 issue

Gary Saul Morson

Death and the Hedgehog

With his conversion to his own highly distinct form of Christianity, Tolstoy made a religion of universal love, forsaking violence, laws, private property, and high culture.

June 22, 2023 issue