tmn The latest addition to my website is César Aira‘s La prueba (The Proof). This is another Aira novel where you wonder what is going happening for the first part and then it suddenly explodes. Marcia is a sixteen-year old girl, wandering through the Flores district of Buenos Aires. She is accosted by two punk women, … Read more
The latest additon to my website is Mariko Ōhara‘s ハイブリッド・チャイルド (Hybrid Child). This is a science fiction novel, the second in the University of Minnesota’s Parallel Futures series and tells the story of a rogue humanoid battle unit, #3, which is all-powerful, virtually indestructible and can assume the form of anything it eats. It hides … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Kirmen Uribe‘s Bilbao-New York-Bilbao (Bilbao-New York-Bilbao). This is a Basque novel, which is not really a novel and is not really about travel between Bilbao and New York. Uribe describes his efforts to write a novel about his grandfather, a fisherman, the Basque painter, Aurelio Arteta and Arteta’s … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Alfredo Navarro Salanga‘s The Birthing of Hannibal Valdez This short novel from the Philippines tells the story not so much of Hannibal Valdez but of his grandfather, Leon. Leon’s daughter-in-law, daughter of one of his tenants, is about to give birth to a child. Leon is sure that … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Taha Hussein‘s دعاء الكروان (The Call of the Curlew). Taha Hussein is considered as one of the greatest Egyptian novelists but is also noted for his liberal views and for the fact that he earned academic and political distinction as well, despite being blind from the age of … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Fernando Aramburu‘s Patria (Homeland). This book has been hugely successful in Spain and has been translated into several languages and will appear in English in March 2019. It tells the story of two Basque families. In one, the father, Txato, is murdered by ETA, the Basque separatist group … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ali Smith‘s How to Be Both. This book tells two stories and, when it was originally published, half were printed with one first and the other half with the other one first. The first one (that I read) concerned the Italian painter Francesco del Cossa, known for his … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Yulisa Pat Amadu Maddy‘s No Past, No Present, No Future. Maddy is known as Sierra Leone’s greatest playwright but he wrote one novel, this one, a grim tale of three young Sierra Leonean men who lose their way in Bauya, an obvious proxy for Sierra Leone, and then … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Norah Lange‘s Personas en la sala (People in the Room). This is the second Lange book I have read but the first to be published in English, sixty-eight years after it first appeared in Spanish. It tells the story of a seventeen-year old woman who observes the three … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Miklós Szentkuthy‘s Barokk Róbert [Robert Baroque]. Though only published three years after his death, this is an early work, written when he was eighteen (and, apparently, never revised or even reread). It is essentially an autobiographical work about his eighteenth year and includes his home and school life, … Read more