Seed Projects
A review by Marcela Valdes
When it was published in Spanish in 2006, Alejandro Zambra's novel Bonsai filled just ninety-four generously spaced pages, and its recent English translation by Carolina De Robertis stretches only to eighty-three. Still, each of these volumes should be considered a marvel of book design and production since in interviews the author has let slip that his original text ran only to forty sheets. Rather than shrink in its conversion to bound covers, as most manuscripts do, Zambra's text has swelled -- and its effect on the world of Chilean literature has been entirely disproportionate to its size. As the venerable Santiago newspaper El Mercurio commented in April 2008, "The publication of Bonsai...marked a kind of bloodletting in Chilean literature. It was said (or argued) that it represented the end of an era, or the beginning of another, in the nation's letters." Reading the book a continent away, I would never have predicted such a fuss, though Bonsai is a delightful work. A love...
|
 |
Previously Reviewed by The Nation
Sort: by date | by title | by author
Rex by Jose Manuel Prieto
 Though not advertised as such in the United States, Jose Manuel Prieto's Rex is actually the third volume in a trilogy that begins with the as-yet-untranslated Enciclopedia de una vida en Rusia (Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia) and also includes the acclaimed Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian...
The Ax by Donald E. Westlake
 The men who killed themselves in shame during the Great Depression because they couldn't provide for their families didn't feel any less responsible because of the social and economic forces arrayed against them. And it appears, in the horror stories that have been in the news since last fall...
News from the Empire by Fernando Del Paso
 In the central states of Mexico, you see many brown campesino faces lit by green or hazel eyes. Locals say this is the only legacy of the French Intervention of 1862-67, when an army with its fair share of rapists and torturers tried to take over the country for its own good in the name of...
The Dickson Baseball Dictionary by Paul Dickson
 Maine is on the northern edge of a pocket of the country that breeds obsessive fandom for the Boston Red Sox and venom for the New York Yankees. That place is known as Red Sox Nation, and my introduction to its treacherous emotional terrain came early. When I was a kid my dad worked the night shift ...
Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare by Jonathan Bate
 Artists' lives are not automatically interesting. However wild the nights, an artist's days are dominated by solitary devotion to the medium: the texture of paint, the measure of syllables. Without that devotion, an artist will have no life as an artist. Along with it, an artist may engage in...
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
 When it was published fifty years ago, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart caused a stir for its revelation of something hitherto strange and unfamiliar in the world of literature: genuine African voices. Achebe was not the first African novelist, as he has sometimes wrongly been called, but his use...
An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides by Anne Carson
 Aeschylus' Oresteia, composed and first performed in 458 BC, is the only complete dramatic trilogy we have from ancient Athens. Not all Athenian trilogies were fashioned from related stories, but the Oresteia was: it tells what happens to the family of Agamemnon when the great general returns home...
Don't Cry: Stories by Mary Gaitskill
 The culture has caught up with Mary Gaitskill, and she's not happy about it. "Things are not like they once were," a journalist says in Don't Cry, an awkwardly self-conscious new collection that seems to represent something of an artistic midlife crisis. "Sex and the City is on TV." The journalist...
Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gerard Prunier
 On November 4, the day Americans chose the son of a Kenyan economist to be their president, the eastern Congolese town of Kiwanja was assaulted by a band of several hundred militiamen, who were festooned with leaves and armed with rifles, spears and machetes. Technically, the fighters -- some of...
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
 In early 1925, British Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, having convinced himself, based on a mix of archival research, deduction and clairvoyance, that a large undiscovered city lay hidden somewhere in the Amazon, entered the jungle to try to find it. The word "quixotic" has its origins in a story...
The Queue
by Vladimir Sorokin
The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills
by John H. Summers
The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation
by Fanny Howe
The Kindly Ones
by Jonathan Littell
The Road to Democracy in Iran (Boston Review Books)
by Akbar Ganji
Amerika -- The Missing Person: A New Translation, Based on the Restored Text
by Franz Kafka
Isaac's Torah: Concerning the Life of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld Through Two World Wars, Three Concentration Camps and Five Motherlands
by Angel Wagenstein
The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008
by Paul Krugman
George, Being George: George Plimpton's Life as Told, Admired, Deplored, and Envied by 200 Friends, Relatives, Lovers, Acquaintances, Rivals
by Nelson W. Aldrich
Patty's Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America
by William Graebner
Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury
by Alison Light
Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang
by John Ayto
Yalo (Rainmaker Translations)
by Elias Khoury
White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
by Brenda Wineapple
How Fiction Works
by James Wood
Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer
by Wendell E. Pritchett
Passionate Uprisings: Iran's Sexual Revolution
by Pardis Mahdavi
Sophocles' Ajax
by John Tipton
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
by Rick Perlstein
The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up
by Liao Yiwu
Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century
by Tony Judt
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
by David Samuels
 Try 4 issues of The Nation, FREE! Where literature and the arts have made a difference since 1865.
Join readers who demand more of writers than bestsellers...more of artists than "product"...and insist that political leaders serve the common good. If you like what you see, including access to every weekly article and review back to 1865, you can get 16 more issues (20 weeks in all) for just $9.97.
Click here
for details. |
| 
Don't Miss
