Latest Review: "Cain" by Jose Saramago
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Fr. Grant Barber on Cain, the latest Jose Saramago novel, available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Margaret Jull Costa’s translation. Grant Barber is a regular reviewer for Three Percent, a keen bibliophile, and an Episcopal priest living on the south shore ...
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Cain
I keep coming back to that basic question, “Why do people tell stories, and others pay attention?” Answers range from creating entertainment (Patterson or Siddons), to engaging in reflections of human nature by a writer such as Conrad or Greene, to intellectual play in novels by Barbary or Murdoch. Some novels can ...
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Latest Review: "The Land at the End of the World" by António Lobo Antunes
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Grant Barber on António Lobo Antunes’s The Land at the End of the World, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and available from W.W. Norton. Antunes is a long-time favorite of mine. I really love his novel Act of the Damned. And Fado ...
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The Land at the End of the World
Judas’s Asshole. Now that title would have stood out at Barnes and Noble. Think of the cover art possibilities. Margaret Jull Costa explains that this original title of this novel, Os Cus de Judas, comes from a Portuguese colloquialism. When I moved to a town in the Northeast earlier in my life people called it ...
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Latest Review: "Stigmata" by Lorenzo Mattotti and Claudio Piersanti
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Grant Barber on Stigmata, a new graphic novel from Fantagraphics by Lorenzo Mattotti and Claudio Piersanti, translated from the Italian by Kim Thompson. Unless I’m totally forgetting something, this is the first review of a translated graphic novel that ...
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Stigmata
I am an ambivalent reader of graphic novels. I’m of a generation that remembers when Superman was less muscled, and hadn’t yet died or been cloned. “Adult graphic novel” designated the rumored underground works about Fritz the cat. The amazing boom of the last couple decades of literary versions has led me to ...
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An Answer from the Silence: A Story from the Mountains
Ah, the storied Swiss Alps: snow capped mountains, fields of wild flowers, burbling streams of clean water, simple folks out doing what simple folks do in such settings. Take for example the flock of sheep accompanied by blond haired girl along a winding path. Especially of note is how she picks up a rock and wings it at ...
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