Recent content by Heteronym

Posted a review of this novella in my blog: .......................... In a 2014 interview António Lobo Antunes explained why his novels revolutionized Portuguese fiction in the 1970s. “At the time the plots were distant things, countries from Antiquity, imaginary, pure fiction all of it.”...

Reviewed this novel recently for my blog: ................... I read John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor in August 2014 and enjoyed its extravagance, ribaldry and satire. But reading up on him I formed this impression that Barth had started out as a boring realist who later embarked in fabulism...

Damn it, this one's tricky, every time I think of someone there's one book that ruins it: Tolstoy's Hadji Murat; Nabokov's Mary; Saramago's The Stone Raft; Eça de Queiroz's The City and the Mountains; Borge's A Universal History of Infamy, Kafka's short-stories, Carter's The Infernal Desire...

I reviewed this collection of short-stories at my blog; ----------------------------- Not long after discovering Paul West, I read Guy Davenport (1927-2005) for the first time. Essayist, translator, painter, poet and short-story writer, Davenport never became a household name, prompting John...

Paul West (b. 1930) was born in England but has been living in New York for decades now; he's married to poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman. The rest you can get in his Wiki. Mirabell reviewed his Rat Man of Paris here. I'm not sure how I heard of him; I know he's one of William H. Gass'...

I just learned that João Ubaldo Ribeiro, an author I wrote about before, passed away today. He was one of Brazil's great contemporary novelists, author of books such as Sargento Getúlio, O Feitiço da Ilha do Pavão and Viva o Povo Brasileiro, a 800-page epic novel about the history of Brazil that...

I figured it was time we started a thread for the novel instead of using the author's thread. Finished it today, and I'm impressed by Gass' talent and craftsmanship. He's a conscious builder of sentences. Each one has to be perfect; he wants each to have little effects - assonance, consonance...

I just found out at another forum that Milan Kundera published a new novel in 2013, and no one told me about it! It was published first in Italian instead of French, and it's called La Festa dell'Insignificanza. Here's the publisher's link and my translation: "To shine a light upon the most...

Just reviewed this novel for my blog: This week is devoted to Angola. We'll begin with its greatest novelist. Pepetela was born in Angola in 1941. Although of Portuguese descent, his parents had also been born in Angola. He grew up in the multiracial city of Benguela, which allowed him to...

Who are the good modern Italian writers? I'm thinking, born since 1960. Feel free to recommend novelists, poets, playwrights and even essayists.

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester is, in my humble estimation, one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. La Saga/Fuga de J.B. is a novel of peerless complexity, it has so many strands going it's a triumph of storytelling the way he keeps them all coherent, regardless of his going back and...

And yet Bruno Schulz is in English...

I recently posted this on my blog: Detectives are the fools of the universe, without receiving any exemption from the dangers of uttering truths. Lumbering through a corrupt, hypocrite, violent world armed with nothing but convictions and an inflated sense of morality. What is that makes...

In 1990 ago Brazil and Portugal idealized an ortographical agreement to harmonize the spelling in both countries as well as in the Portuguese-speaking African countries. The plan was for the implementation to start taking place around 2011, to culminate in 2015 with the full transition to the...

Rubem Fonseca (b. 1925) is considered one of the best living Brazilian writers. Admired by Thomas Pynchon and Mario Vargas Llosa, in a career spanning fifty years he has written novels, short-story collections and film scripts. In 2003 he received the Camões Prize, joining the ranks of other...