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Abdellah Taïa is Morocco’s highest profile gay writer, a point underscored in the accompanying blurb to his recently translated An Arab Melancholia. Since the book is billed as an autobiographical novel, one might expect—wrongly, it turns out—a gut-wrenching exposition of the existential dilemma...

If melancholy can be sweet, then The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am (Dalkey, 2011) is just that. Kjersti A. Skomsvold’s debut novel, which won Norway’s Tarjei Vesaas's debutantpris (2009), provides a brief, sentimental glimpse into what it means to be lonely. The gloom of such a weighty (and...

Ludvík Vaculík’s novel The Guinea Pigs is charming and unsettling at the same time. From the outset, Vaculík disarms the reader by treating the tale as if it were being read to us by a parent at bedtime. “Our family,” the protagonist tells us, “is originally from the country. Our family...

Review originally published in Words Without Border (link here) A THOUSAND ROOMS OF DREAM AND FEAR: Translated from the Dari by Sarah Maguire and Yama Yari Other Press, 2010 The modern history of Afghanistan is a tapestry rent and torn by invasions and internal conflict, both political...

I reviewed Xiaoda Xiao's premiere novel, The Cave Man, for The Mantle. It draws on the experience of him and his friends who spent time in Chinese prisons and labor camps under Mao, and then had to re-assimilate into Chinese society. Opening of the review: Xiaoda Xiao?s novel, The Cave Man...

From my review published in Words Without Borders (original posting) A stalwart advocate for freedom of speech, Taslima Nasrin is an exiled political and artistic refugee who has had her share of literary revenge. Despite her work being banned in Bangladesh and India, and even as multiple...

Patricia Schonstein Pinnock's slim novel, Skyline, has just been reviewed, or shall I say revisited, on The Mantle. This in light of fears of xenophobic violence rearing its ugly head post-World Cup. INTRO: For Cape Town, South Africa, the World Cup may have come and gone, but some things...

Alberto Ruy-S?nchez's The Secret Gardens of Mogador explores the depths of sensuality found in the nurture of nature. In a modern take on the role of Scheherazade, the narrator of this erotic novella is charged with finding the gardens of a semi-mythical town and describing their intricacies...

A review of Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow An excerpt: Welcome to Our Hillbrow follows the story of Refent?e, ?child of Tiragalong,? and several of his close friends and family members. Having moved to Johannesburg to begin his tertiary education, Refent?e ends up staying with...

Reviews of PEN World Voices Festival 2010 in NYC can be found on The Mantle Click here: PEN 2010 | The Mantle

Here's my take on Neruda's bilingual Fully Empowered, posted originally on The Mantle: Quick Review: Fully Empowered by Pablo Neruda | The Mantle Somewhere I had read (or at least I think I had read) that Neruda preferred that his poetry be read aloud. And why not? Poets throughout time, from...

In The Mantle's second virtual roundtable, three acclaimed authors and poets from around the world ponder the weighty question, what is the role of the writer in a conflict zone? With intimate knowledge of the trauma and mental anguish so many writers face when laboring in the face of adversity...

A recently published essay on The Mantle actually examines four of Ondaatje's novels: Divisadero, In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient, and Anil's Ghost. Enjoy... The Art of Looking Back In the contemporary literary imagination, few authors can claim to have the immediate emotive...

A recently published essay on The Mantle actually examines four of Ondaatje's novels: Divisadero, In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient, and Anil's Ghost. Enjoy... The Art of Looking Back In the contemporary literary imagination, few authors can claim to have the immediate emotive...

A recently published essay on The Mantle actually examines Divisadero and three other Ondaatje novels (In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient, and Anil's Ghost). Enjoy... The Art of Looking Back In the contemporary literary imagination, few authors can claim to have the immediate emotive...

New on The Mantle, a review of Coetzee's third-person narrative memoir that, oddly, better depicts a strong mother than a boy's life. The hero of J.M. Coetzee?s childhood memoir is not the boy who grows up to become the 2003 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Nor is the hero, as some...

I searched for a thread on Bolano's The Savage Detectives, but could not find one... surprisingly! So if there is one that I missed, please let me know and I'll post this information under the appropriate thread. Patrick Guyer has just published a review of the novel on The Mantle. Here are the...

K. Sello Duiker seems like a very intriguing writer. I have not read any of his material, but after reading this review and learning about his suicide, I have put him on my list. Committed suicide at age thirty, yet another writer gone too soon. Intro paragraphs to the review of Thirteen Cents...

from The Mantle: Quick Review: English, August by Upamanyu Chatterjee | The Mantle It was the blurb on the back of this book that initially attracted me. The synopsis likens this Indian novel to a synthesis of John Kennedy Toole?s A Confederacy of Duncesand J.D. Salinger?s Catcher in the Rye...

An article published on The Mantle compares author/poet Anne Michaels' first novel, Fugitive Pieces (1998) to her newest one, The Winter Vault (2009). The review is... fawning... Before Anne Michaels made the transition from poet to author, Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, two Canadian...