Interviews Renee H. Shea Monique Truong / Photo © Haruka Sakaguchi Monique Truong, who came to the United States in 1975 as a refugee from Vietnam, began exploring untold and ignored histories in her first novel, The Book of Salt (2003), told through the voice of Binh, the cook of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris. Her autobiographical second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (2010) is a coming-of-age story set in North Carolina. In her most recent novel, The Sweetest Fruits (Viking, 2019), Truong tells the story of Lafcadio Hearn from the perspective of three women: his mother, Rosa; his first wife, Alethea; and his Japanese wife, Setsu. Shea: At its core, The Sweetest Fruits is a story about storytelling—and it’s Russian dolls of narrative! It’s not only that three different women have their say about Hearn and their relationship with him, but each is telling her story to a specific audience—so issues of mediation and agency add further complications, as do oral vs. written stories and translation. How did you arrive at this approach instead of just telling the story in the voice of one person, then the next, then the next? Truong: This question is a Russian doll of inquiries! You’re absolutely right that the novel is interested in the different ways that stories are transmitted to us: oral vs. written, in our mother tongue vs. in translation, private story vs. public history, women’s voices vs. men’s, face-to-face vs.... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'
[ World Literature Today | 2019-09-17 13:54:26 UTC ]
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Daniel Yergin is a highly respected authority on energy, international politics, and economics, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, and Shattered Peace:... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-09-18 08:47:31 UTC ]
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Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. His previous books include the poetry collections Middle Earth, Blackbird and Wolf, Touch, and Pierce the Skin, as well as a memoir, Orphic Paris. He has received many awards for his work, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-09-04 08:51:11 UTC ]
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Pigs They are born in a flood of magma. They claw their way to the center of the earth. They don’t know what a blouse is, and they don’t care. There are seventeen constellations named for their kin. They coordinate all the Monday briefings. When they read the wrong books, they return them to... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2020-08-31 11:00:00 UTC ]
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ISTANBUL HAS BEEN a hub for literary publishing since the late-19th-century Tanzimat era. But what does it mean to be a literary editor in Istanbul today? I sat down with Mustafa Çevikdoğan and Mehmet Erte to address this question, among others. Erte is the editor-in-chief of the oldest and... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-08-26 12:30:25 UTC ]
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Makenna Goodman on leaving New York publishing behind for the farms of Vermont, and why publishing her first novel was traumatic. Continue reading at The Paris Review
[ The Paris Review | 2020-08-20 17:18:24 UTC ]
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Interviews Richard van Leeuwen is a senior lecturer in Islamic studies at the University of Amsterdam. This year, he won the 2020 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the Arabic Culture in Other Languages category for his book The Thousand and One Nights and... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-08-10 20:32:46 UTC ]
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NATASHA TRETHEWEY’S Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir is a breakthrough book that artfully balances prose and lyricism as it guides us through unspeakable trauma. Prior to our conversation, I felt a bond with Natasha since I spent much of my youth “as the girl whose brother committed suicide.”... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-07-28 12:30:40 UTC ]
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A look at how people have engaged with “Huck Finn” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” over time offers a snapshot of who we were and are. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-07-03 10:00:00 UTC ]
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NEAL POLLACK, known to his fans as “The Greatest Living American Writer,” has had many incarnations in his literary life, from novelist to mystery writer to prolific memoirist. First, in his 2008 memoir Alternadad, Pollack reflects on his recent fatherhood and its incompatibility with his grumpy... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-06-28 15:00:57 UTC ]
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Set during an extremely wet December, Carys Bray’s new novel tells the story of the cooling climate of a marriage, as well as dealing with climate anxiety. Though she started writing the book almost four years ago, she notes that in the intervening years discussion of the issues she explores in... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-06-26 02:55:29 UTC ]
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Banner image by Jazzy Harvey. ¤ ONE OF MY FAVORITE statements about Los Angeles, something that really captures its ethos, comes from Cameron Esposito in an article she provided for The A.V. Club. Esposito remarks on “how logical a backbone [L.A.] provides to completely illogical pursuits.” It’s... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-06-25 17:00:38 UTC ]
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Interviews Veronica Esposito Photo by Camila Valdés Megan McDowell has translated many contemporary authors from Latin America and Spain, including Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, and Lina Meruane. Shortlisted for the Man Booker... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-06-22 15:20:00 UTC ]
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GIVEN THE LONG TRADITION of memoirs written by men of a certain age and stature looking back on their life and accomplishments, the surge in memoirs by women in recent years has been quite a breakthrough. What We Carry, the new memoir by Maya Shanbhag Lang, is nothing short of radical, not just... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-06-21 12:30:36 UTC ]
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Every Monday through Friday, AudioFile’s editors recommend the best in audiobook listening. We keep our daily episodes short and sweet, with audiobook clips to give you a sample of our featured listens. Host Michele Cobb speaks with narrator Julia Whelan, one of AudioFile’s 2020 Golden Voices,... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-06-08 09:15:30 UTC ]
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Interviews Andrea Bryant Published by Cornell University Press in 2019 and awarded the 2019 American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize (20th and21st Centuries), Stephanie Malia Hom’s Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-05-26 12:48:05 UTC ]
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A COOKBOOK IS a kind of invitation to its author’s table. So it is with Irina Georgescu’s book Carpathia: Food from the Heart of Romania, which draws overdue attention to the food of her native country. Of course, the culinary world is crowded and chaotic at the best of times. Turmoil such as it... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-05-23 17:00:06 UTC ]
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Interviews Veronica Esposito Emma Ramadan is a literary translator based in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is the co-owner of Riffraff, a bookstore and bar. She is the recipient of an NEA Translation Fellowship, a PEN/Heim grant, and a Fulbright... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-05-18 18:20:27 UTC ]
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IT IS ONLY IN the second half of Ellen O’Connell Whittet’s poignant and exquisite memoir about ballet (and other causes of female pain), What You Become in Flight, that it dawns on the reader — or on this reader, at least — that she’s invoking the word “flight” in two senses: the balletic sense... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-05-07 17:00:08 UTC ]
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