2 book reviews: "The Break" and "Underground Time" -- New York Journal of Books

Thanks to a change in the publication date of one of the books I have two reviews published on the same day. Both are novels in translation, one from Italian and the other from French. 

“The Break is reminiscent of Italian neo-realist cinema of the late 1940s and is enthusiastically recommended to all readers. Kudos to Howard Curtis for a wonderful translation.” This paperback is printed on high quality paper with a handsome wrap-around cover.

 

“Because Underground Time’s prose largely lacks the delicious density of the best literary fiction in translation, it appears to target a middlebrow readership. But readers with highbrow tastes may want to make an exception to their usual literary fare on account of its social criticism.”

 

Read these and my other book reviews on New York Journal of Books.

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A Meaning for Wife | New York Journal of Books

“Your wife is killed by a cashew (anaphylactic shock), but there isn't time to grieve because your toddler son is always at your heels—wanting to be fed, to be played with, or to sleep next to you all night long. A change of pace seems necessary, so you decide to visit your parents in order to attend your twenty-year high school reunion. What begins as a weekend getaway quickly becomes a theater for dealing with the past—a past that you will have to re-imagine in order to have any hope of a future for you and your son.”--Mark Yakish, A Meaning for Wife

“Toward the end of the novel there is a gutsy shift in narrative tone that lends the ending a sense of closure. In recent years, women writers such as Joan Didion and Meghan O’Rourke have published nonfiction memoir accounts of grief. In his debut novel Mr. Yakich provides the male perspective. Recommended to anyone who has experienced loss.”

Read the rest of my review in New York Journal of Books

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On otherness, ethnic and racial identity from a Jewish perspective

An interesting and engaging blog post from last March on otherness, ethnic and racial identity:

Passing for White: Other-ness and Judaism

 

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Prospect Park Foliage

via flickr.com

Fall foliage, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY.

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New York Journal of Books: "The Hall of the Singing Caryatids" by Victor Pelevin

“At barely more than 100 small (four and a half by seven inch) pages in Andrew Bromfield’s excellent English translation The Hall of the Singing Caryatidssucceeds both as a novella of ideas and as a science fiction work of fantasy, and is recommended to all readers enamored of thought provoking fiction.”

Read the entire review on New Yorik Journal of Books.

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