Good Offices
Evelio Rosero’s first novel to be translated into English since his award-winning The Armies takes place on a much smaller scale than that hallucinatory story about the damaging effects of civil war in Colombia. Good Offices, lighter in tone and slighter than The Armies, documents the events of a single day in a single ...
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Latest Review: "Vita Nuova" by Bohumil Hrabal
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Dan Vitale on Bohumil Hrabal’s Vita Nuova, which is translated from the Czech by Tony Liman and available from Northwestern University Press. Dan Vitale is a regular contributor to Three Percent—a program sponsored in party through a grant from ...
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Vita Nuova
Vita Nuova is the second volume in a trilogy of autobiographical novels based on Bohumil Hrabal’s courtship of and marriage to Eliška Plevová (nicknamed Pipsi) and the first decade or so of his fame as one of Czechoslovakia’s most beloved writers. Originally published in samizdat in Prague in 1986, not long before ...
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Am I a Redundant Human Being?
The Austrian actress, writer, and painter Mela Hartwig (1893–1967) published relatively little during her lifetime: a collection of stories, a novel, a novella, and a book of poems. She did most of this work between 1921, when she married and retired from acting, and 1938, when she and her husband moved to London to escape ...
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Latest Review: "Am I a Redundant Human Being?" by Mela Hartwig
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Dan Vitale on Mela Hartwig’s Am I a Redundant Human Being?, which was translated from the German by Kerri A. Pierce and published earlier this year by Dalkey Archive Press. I remember first hearing about this book while on an editorial trip with John ...
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Latest Review: "The Misadventures of the New Satan" by A. H. Tammsaare
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Dan Vitale on A. H. Tammsaare’s The Misadventures of the New Satan, which was translated by Olga Shartze, revised by Christopher Moseley and published by Norvik/Dufour. Although the title would be well suited to a mediocre sit-com, this novel sounds pretty ...
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The Misadventures of the New Satan
A. H. Tammsaare was the pseudonym of Anton Hansen, considered by many to be Estonia’s greatest writer. Born in 1878 (on a farm called Tammsaare, or “Oak Island”), Hansen did not graduate from secondary school until age 25, because his family’s sporadic income necessitated long hiatuses in his education. However, he ...
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