Quarterly Conversation

Broken Glass Park by Alina Bronsky

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 01:30:48 +0000

In some ways, Alina Bronsky's Broken Glass Park is exactly what one might expect from a debut novel whose narrator and heroine is a seventeen-year-old girl. The book is fast-paced, engaging, and not exactly challenging in terms of form or style. What makes the book worth reading, however, is the fact that the story is a unique one, and one which is told with great simplicity, straightforwardness, and ease. Sascha Naimann is a flawed yet very lovable heroine, and it is very difficult not to be...

A Life on Paper by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 01:30:13 +0000

The man on the cover of A Life on Paper is Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, not his double Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Châteaureynaud—who has written nine novels and scores of stories in French, won major literary prizes, and been translated into a dozen other languages—now comes to English-language readers for the first time thanks to translator Edward Gauvin and Small Beer Press. A Life on Paper selects twenty-two of his stories, ranging from the early '70s to recent years, and I...

The King of Trees by Ah Cheng

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 01:29:33 +0000

The stories collected in The King of Trees are all concerned with the zhiqing who have been sent down to a remote corner of Yunnan province. Ah Cheng himself spent much of the Cultural Revolution doing farm work in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, and this border area is clearly the inspiration and basis for the setting of these three tales. All of the stories were written in the mid-1980s, when memories of the Cultural Revolution were still very fresh. Reading these stories a quarter-century later, I...

The Three Fates by Linda Lê

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 01:28:57 +0000

A well-known figure on the French literary scene, Linda Lê has had very little exposure to readers in the United States. A new translation of her 1997 novel The Three Fates may begin to change that situation. The novel is the first of three that Lê wrote following the death of her Vietnamese father, and like many of her works, it portrays individuals grappling with emotion and trauma in the aftermath of immigration from Vietnam.

Stefan Zweig’s World of Yesterday

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 01:28:30 +0000

Zweig was obsessed with the impossibility of attaining any distance on catastrophe in an age of enveloping mass media. He saw the inability to escape word of fresh disaster wherever and whenever it was happening—a phenomenon he labeled the "organization of simultaneity"— degrading humanity's capacity to respond to suffering. "People speak so lightly of bombardments," he wrote in one of his final letters, "But when I read of houses collapsing I collapse with them." Zweig's defeat in...

Lizard à la Heart by Roberto Ransom

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 01:28:13 +0000

"Lizard à la Heart" is the opening story in Roberto Ransom’s short story collection Desaparecidos, animales y artistas (Conaculta, 1999), which I've translated as "Missing Persons, Animals and Artists." Ransom is an award-winning Mexican writer whose published work includes novels, short-story collections, poetry, essays as well as children’s literature. The stories in "Missing Persons, Animals and Artists" possess great humanity—in their exploration of character, emotional depth,...

Kindred Poets: Kay Ryan and Marianne Moore

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 01:27:55 +0000

More than most contemporary poets, Kay Ryan listens to words as seasoned concertgoers listen to Mozart. Who before her noticed the best in bestiary? Maybe Ogden Nash. Or maybe one of her poetic forebears, Marianne Moore.

Recreational Vehicles on Fire by Jane Ormerod

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 01:27:30 +0000

Jane Ormerod's work demands to be listened to out loud. One of the blurbs for the book is from Paul Baker, a radio programmer, who describes the work via his auditory experience: "To listen to Jane read is to see a dance of images, some pleasing, some disturbing." Another blurb bypasses the book at hand and relates, instead, to the performance of reading aloud: "I first saw Jane Ormerod perform in Vancouver, B.C. when we began our Perpetual Motion Roadshow tour, and what a trip it was! The...

The Cambridge Companion to Allegory Edited by Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 01:24:52 +0000

Even though allegory continues to have contemporary application, a definition of allegory is elusive. This is recognized by Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck who have put together a companion to this slippery concept.

Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines by Julie Carr

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 01:24:34 +0000

Poetry is not alone in the arts in its struggle to build from and move beyond the quotidian, but it is perhaps the genre in which a failure to do so can be most immediately glaring—by way of its concision and its reputation. Carr rises to the challenge and creates poems that are at once intimate but not so much so that they are closed off to the reader, leaving no space for the reader's imagination to inhabit.