Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
I don’t believe I’ve ever read any book that I have more trouble reviewing than Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Though it’s classified as a novel, it is unlike any novel I had read before. In […]
Category Archives: World Literature
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse tells the story about the titular character and his spiritual quest. Siddhartha is the son of a Brahmin, a Hindu priest, who realizes he wasn’t suited for the traditional path towards […]
Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez
Memories of My Melancholy Whores begins with its protagonist and narrator declaring the objectionable goal of wanting to have sex with a teenaged virgin. It’s the gift he wants to give himself for his ninetieth […]
Book Review: Cinnamon by Samar Yazbek
“Poetry,” one of my literature professors had said long ago in class, “is about mixed emotions.” She was talking about Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” a short poem loaded with both positive and negative imagery […]
Book Review: Piercing by Ryu Murakami
Piercing begins with a chilling scene and intensifies from there. It’s an unrelenting, violent novel that refuses to turn a blind eye to its characters’ deranged compulsions. It’s a novel about compulsions, but not the […]
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johanna Wolfgang von Goethe
According to Wikipedia, when The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774, it became the world’s first best seller. Since book publishing was, at best, only a toddler, since copyright laws were nonexistent, and […]
Book Review: Night by Elie Wiesel
Around August 4th of this year, Elie Wiesel’s childhood home in Sighet, Romania was vandalized. The vandal spray-painted public toilet and Nazi Jew lying in hell with Hitler and Anti-Semite pedophile across the outside walls. […]
The Dreamers by Gilbert Adair
In 1968, the Cinémathèque Française in Paris stood as one of the few government-funded and operated tributes to cinema in the world. Henri Langlois, who cofounded the organization in the 1930s, still ran it. During […]
Book Review: The Long Day’s Evening
It’s been a goal of mine–unsatisfactorily fulfilled–to include in these pages reviews not only of novels from my own country, but also those written overseas. A culture can become myopic if it views the world […]
Book Review: The Snowman by Jo Nesbø
To use a trite, overused, but descriptive phrase, Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman is a page turner. Once I picked up the novel and began reading it, I didn’t want to set it down, no matter how […]
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