Cool Guardian Series
The Guardian is one of my favorite newspapers for any number of reasons, but I particularly like their series and their overall international focus. For instance, earlier this month they launched their New Europe Series, which features an in-depth look at four European countries: Germany, France, Spain, and Poland. (The ...
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Interview with Gunter Grass on "The Box"
Maya Jaggi from The Guardian has a really interesting long piece on Gunter Grass’s The Box, which comes out next week (both in the UK and U.S.). (And which sounds fantastic . . . Hopefully HMH will send a copy to us for review . . .): The second volume of his fictive autobiography, The Box, is published by Harvill ...
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Obituary: Rodolfo Fogwill
Although it hasn’t been covered in the U.S. papers (at least to the best of my knowledge), Argentine author Rodolfo Fogwill passed away at the end of last month. He published a ton of stuff in Argentina—around 20 books—but only one—Malvinas Requiem—has been published in English translation. ...
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Globish
Robert McCrum—one of my favorite UK book critics, due in part to his interest in all things international—has a really interesting looking book coming out this May. Entitled Globish, it will be available in the UK from Penguin, and from W.W. Norton in the U.S. (although god help me to find this on the Norton ...
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Another Guardian Top Ten List
In addition to Selcuk Altan’s Turkish lit list, The Guardian also posted a top ten list of books about the Berlin Wall. Suzanne Munshower’s list—which is presented in a narrative format with interesting details about each of the books—actually overlaps a bit with The Wall in My Head the book about ...
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"This Part of Town Is No Place For Old-Timers" by Jachym Topol [Guardian Short Stories from Eastern Europe]
The final installment in The Guardian‘s_ Stories from a New Europe series is This Part of Town Is No Place for Old-Timers by Czech author Jachym Topol. David Short translated this piece about a Czech writer remembering life before 1989, his father’s failure as a writer and dissident, and how the post-wall society ...
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"Mustafa" by Nikolai Grozni [Guardian Short Stories from Eastern Europe]
Today’s installment in “The Guardian‘s” week of Eastern European stories is Mustafa by Nikolai Grozni. By far the funniest piece of the week, “Mustafa” centers around a funereal gone awry: In any event, questioning the authenticity of my grandmother’s body at her funeral was not ...
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