“The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation” provides a thorough and critical examination
of translation from the seventeenth century to the present day. It shows
how fluency prevailed over other translation strategies to shape...
Simon Leys is a Renaissance man for the era of globalization: a distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature, he was one of the first Westerners to expose the horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Leys’s interests and expertise...
In Myself with Others, Fuentes has assembled essays reflecting three of the great elements of his work: autobiography, love of literature, and politics. They include his reflections on his beginning as a writer, his celebrated Harvard University...
Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003 - Between Parentheses collects most of the newspaper columns and articles Bolaño wrote during the last five years of his life, as well as the texts of some of...
On Being Blue is a book about everything blue — sex and sleaze and sadness, among other things — and about everything else. It brings us the world in a word as only William H. Gass, among contemporary American writers, can do.
Gass writes:
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In spring of 1846, Edgar Allan Poe moved from New York City to his country cottage in Fordham where he wrote "The Philosophy of Composition", an essay that promises to recount the method he used to write his famous poem "The Raven" (1845). In the...
One of Latin America's greatest novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa is also a most acute and wide-ranging cultural critic and an acerbic political commentator. Touchstones includes his readings of major twentieth-century novels, from Heart of Darkness...