Writing a novel after having won a Nobel Prize for Literature must be even more daunting than trying to follow a brilliant, bestselling debut. In Somersault (the title refers to an abrupt, public renunciation of the past), Kenzaburo Oe has...
It is winter, somewhere in the United Kingdom, and an eight-year-old boy is removed from his home and family in the middle of the night. He learns that he is the victim of an extraordinary experiment. In an attempt to reform society, the government...
Stork Mountain tells the story of a young Bulgarian immigrant who, in an attempt to escape his mediocre life in America, returns to the country of his birth. Retracing the steps of his estranged grandfather, a man who suddenly and inexplicably cut...
At a small gallery in Florence, a Peruvian writer happens upon a photograph of a tribal storyteller deep in the jungles of the Amazon. He is overcome with the eerie sense that he knows this man…that the storyteller is not an Indian at all but an...
The incomparable Ali Smith melds the tale and the essay into a magical hybrid form, a song of praise to the power of stories in our lives
In February 2012, the novelist Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative...
Poetry. Fiction. Cross Genre. "A marvelous, musical texture of rhymes and echoes"-Harry Matthews. "Eunoia" is the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels, and the word quite literally means "beautiful ...
The war is ending, but for the occupants of the castle, their troubles are just beginning. Armed gangs roam a lawless land, and the castle becomes the focus of a dangerous game of desire, deceit and death to one particular outlawed captain. From...
A man decides to visit his mistress. But on arrival, he sees her embracing another man. He waits for the interloper to leave, then goes in, starts an argument with the woman, strikes her and it results in her death. Having left the flat without...
At last a new book: a baker’s dozen of stories all with Helen DeWitt’s razor-sharp genius
For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most...
The Wild Things — based very loosely on the storybook by Maurice Sendak and the screenplay cowritten with Spike Jonze — is about the confusions of a boy, Max, making his way in a world he can’t...