Twelve Loops
In the socio-cultural milieu of his native Ukraine, Yuri Andrukhovych has achieved the kind of status that demands that his name be followed by “himself” every time it shows up in print. His previous novels Recreations and Moscoviad are two important reasons for this recognition, and Twelve Loops is yet another work that ...
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2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction
Over at the World Literature Forum, Stewart points out that the longlist for the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction has been announced. The longlist of 16 books was chosen from 121 eligible entries and are as follows (in alphabetical order); The Bottle and the Genie, Mohammad Abu Maatouk The Tobacco ...
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Latest Review: The Howling Miller
Our latest review is of Arto Paasilinna’s The Howling Miller, which was recently published by Canongate. The Howling Miller tells the story of Gunnar Huttunen, a mysterious miller who shows up in the remote northern Finnish province of Lapland and buys and repairs a run-down mill that the locals had all but ...
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Dubravka on The World
Novelist and critic Dubravka Ugresic talks to World Books editor Bill Marx about her latest collection of essays, “Nobody’s Home,” which trains a wryly spiky eye to a number of subjects, from the plight of public intellectuals to the fluid nature of cultural identity in the age of ...
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Congratulations to Paper Republic
Another late post by us—I think we’ll be catching up for the next month—but congratulations to Paper Republic: We are delighted to announce that Paper Republic has received a substantial grant from Arts Council England to develop the website and to fund associated activities. Our aim is to re-design the ...
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Growing interest in Der Turm
A few days age we wrote about the German Book Prize Winner, Uwe Tellkamp’s Der Turm, and lamented the fact that there wouldn’t be much interest in the 1000+ page book from American or British publishers. Well, a little birdie tells me that we were quite mistaken and that Suhrkamp is fielding a “huge wave ...
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David Harrison on the scarcity of language
There are 7,000 languages spoken in the world. This, argues linguist K David Harrison, represents the greatest repository of human knowledge ever assembled – but it’s rapidly eroding, and this will be terrible. We’re not only losing information, but we’re losing ways of understanding the world. Why are ...
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