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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Though homely in the face and wearing the largest glasses most people have every seen, Isserley has large breasts. They’re modeled after the breasts of a centerfold model, and in all her travels, she had […]
After finding and losing eleven jobs in two years, Célestine, a domestic maid, took a new position in the country. In an effort to understand her failure to find stability, as she began working for […]
I became an atheist at the Cathedral of Avila in Spain. Standing in the cathedral, staring at the gilded alter, I overheard one of my travel companions say: “Just think. While this was being built, […]
“Who’s your favorite writer?” people sometimes ask me. “What’s your favorite novel?” I shy away from answering. I distrust absolutisms, and favorite implies an absolute status. But some writers I keep coming back to–Fitzgerald, Hemingway, […]
The fault, I confess, lies with me. I couldn’t get into Carlos Fuentes’ Destiny and Desire. Though I read the book from the first page to the last, it was a struggle. I’m not sure […]
“I like long novels,” I overheard a bookstore clerk say years ago. “I like long novels that span years and in which characters change and grow.” Though I don’t believe she was talking about Margaret […]
