Dreamers Rise

A young officer named Giovanni Drogo sets out on a journey to his first post in the temporary company of a colleague, and looks back over hi...

Two hundred pages into my second attempt to read Middlemarch I've thrown in the towel. I went into it with high hopes, having recently ...

The narrator of this novel by the elusive writer who called himself B. Traven is one Gerard Gales, an American seaman who oversleeps while ...

When I first read this 1978 novel by Georges Perec in David Bellos's translation years ago I recall being entertained but also perhaps a...

One to watch out for: a promised English-language translation of Gabriele Tergit's family saga Effingers, which was originally publishe...

This novel set in a fictitious Eastern European country was published in 1983, that is, the year after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, but sup...

And some books are just not meant for one ... I picked up The Idiot because I was more or less housebound for a few days and tired of dippi...

Machado de Assis: In life, the watchful eye of public opinion, the conflict of interests, the struggle of greed against greed oblige a ...

Two brilliant pages from Jason Lutes's mammoth graphic novel set in the waning years of the Weimar Republic. Berlin is published ...

Amar, a Moroccan adolescent, hides out on the roof while the house he has been staying in is raided by the French, who are looking for memb...

Thomas Pynchon: Rachel and Roony sat on a bench in Sheridan Square, talking about Mafia and Paola. It was one in the morning, a wind had ri...

Every novel is philosophical, in that it consciously or (more usually) unconsciously embodies a theory of being. We know that this is true...

"Novel reading has been fearfully on the increase during the last fifteen or twenty years, and especially in the last ten years; and ...

The novelist Charles Simmons has died . I have fond memories of two of his books (there were several others I never got around to): the fair...

Milan Kundera: Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judg...

"I despise the looks of a novel. The cursed infernal things, I can't bear the sight of one. They are a curse to every one that read...

After having read a couple of reviews raving about Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels I decided to try the first volume, and quickly be...

Charles Shirō Inouye: "The fixed point of view of the realistic painter finds its analogue in the omniscient perspective of the autho...

This short novel, published in 1981, is based on an incident that had taken place some 30 years earlier, when a young man named Cayetano Gen...

At first glance, Ana María Matute's 1960 novel Primera memoria seems much of a piece with the narratives with which she ended her car...