It is easy for authors interested in philosophy and linguistics to allow their fiction to slip into a slough of linguistic puzzles and philosophical ponderings (not always, but oft
Domenico Starnone definitely knows how to tell a story. The tension that quickly builds over the first few pages of his books continues throughout until the very last pages, in fac
Captives deserves to stand on the same shelf with Joyce’s Ulysses, Döblin’s Berlin, Alexanderplatz, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Kafka’s The Trial and a volume of st
Fans of Juli Zeh’s work like myself will not be disappointed by this novel: as she did in The Method (translated by Sally-Ann Spencer), with Empty Hearts she takes us a little in
Lutz Seiler’s Kruso takes us back to the last breaths of a political simulacrum: the Soviet-controlled part of Germany called the ‘German Democratic Republic’. I had the chan
It is with great sadness that I learned today of the death of the grand old man of Lithuanian philosophy, Arvydas Šliogeris (born 1944). He evolved quickly from a translator and i
It is exceptionally difficult to say anything about this short, remarkable novel without revealing crucial details about it, things that the reader should discover during reading.
Arnold Pessers is a photographer in his early thirties, who has arrived in Japan five years before this short novel begins, to take a series of photos for a tourist guidebook. He h
Most readers of Marc Augé’s work will know him primarily, or perhaps only, as an anthropologist. Indeed, he is the author of a dozen academic books, including the seminal Non-Pl
This is a book about obsession. That, and what is revealed in the jacket copy – an aspiring 35-year-old writer notices, by chance, at a post office, a man of whom he used to be j
