BTBA Reading Group, BTBA Display
I didn’t notice this until just now, but Joshua Mostafa has set up a book club on LibraryThing to read a book a month from the BTBA Shortlist. He needs a few more members to get this rolling, so anyone who’s interested should head here and join up. It’s free, easy, will be great fun, etc. (And it’s ...
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More WWB/RTW Book Club Posts
The final two posts from the Words Without Borders/Reading the World book club discussion of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Mandarins are now online. In the first, Michael Orthofer discusses the posthumous story “The Life of a Fool” and briefly compares the two available translations (De Wolf’s from Archipelago, ...
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Words Without Borders Book Club
In Michael Orthofer’s most recent post on Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s The Mandarins, he focuses on the writer himself: As we slowly wind up the discussion, moving towards The Life of a Fool and Cogwheels (which I figure will be the appropriate notes to end on), I’m still struck by how much a proper (?) sense of the ...
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Words Without Borders Book Club
Over at WWB, Michael Orthofer has a couple new posts in the month-long discussion of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Mandarins. The first is about the title story, and, well, it’s title: When I hear (read) Mandarins, especially in an East Asian context, I think: Chinese wise men. Something along those lines, anyway. ...
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Words Without Borders/Reading the World Book Club: The Rebels by Sandor Marai
All this month at Words Without Borders, Mark Sarvas will be leading a book discussion on Sandor Marai’s The Rebels. The Rebels was a Reading the World 2007 title. Mark’s introductory post should be up at the WWB Blog soon, but for now, here’s his post about the club, and his introductory ...
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Words Without Borders
The September Issue of Words Without Borders is now online and features Portuguese writing from Portugal, Mozambique, Angola, and Brazil, “with Jose Eduardo Agualusa, Rosa Alice Branco, Alexander Cuadros, Mia Couto, Manoel de Barros, Augusta Faro, Rubem Fonseca, Teolinda Gersao, Milton Hatoum, Conceicao Lima, Alberto ...
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Simenon in the Philadelphia Inquirer
Frank Wilson’s review of Simenon’s The Engagement is pretty much just a plot summary, but it does point to the aspect of the book that I found most intriguing: Human beings, as portrayed in this novel, range narrowly from the merely ordinary and banal to the mean-spirited, bitter, and grasping. What makes it ...
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