Of the many works by the renowned German author Thomas Mann (1875–1955), including Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, none match the epic proportion or literary legacy of the novel Buddenbrooks. Written early in his career, this story of… Read More ›
A Brief Life is the first major novel by Juan Carlos Onetti (1909–94), although the work is fourth in chronological order when placed with his related novels. It marks a watershed in the Uruguay-born Onetti’s career as well as in… Read More ›
The Bridge on the Drina is the novel that brought international acclaim— as well as the 1961 Nobel Prize—to the Yugoslav writer Ivo Andrić (1892–1975). Written during World War II, this short novel is the best expression of Andric´’s singular… Read More ›
Botchan is one of the best-loved novels in Japan and a true comic masterpiece. Written at the beginning of the 20th century by Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), the novel tells the story of a gauche middle school teacher. Botchan, or “little… Read More ›
Set in postwar Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the Stalinist purges of World War II, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is “a novel in the form of variations” that explores how totalitarianism affects individual and collective, national and personal,… Read More ›
The Body Snatchers is arguably the masterwork of Uruguay-born Juan Carlos Onetti (1909–94), a distinction that ranks it above many other great novels. It was written at the margins of the so-called Latin American Boom— a period of intense literary… Read More ›
Sadeq Hedayat (1903–51) was for many decades the best-known modern prose writer in Persian, the language of a country whose purified literary lexicon and restrictive linguistic formalism he sought to violate by introducing crude idioms and colloquial phrases. He has… Read More ›
José Saramago (1922–2010 ), one of Portugal’s most famous writers, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1988. His novel Blindness is considered one of his most outstanding literary achievements. A speculative parable reminiscent of Albert Camus’s The Plague,… Read More ›
Black Shack Alley is Keith Q. Warner’s English translation of the classic French novel La Rue Cases-Nègres by Joseph Zobel (1915–2006). The title of Zobel’s work means “Breaking Negroes [Slaves] Street.” Black Shack Alley is an autobiographical text that evolves… Read More ›
Black Rain is one of the most powerful works of literature in any language dealing with the aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe. Comparable, at least on the surface, with American author John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946), Black Rain by Japanese author… Read More ›
Written by Israeli writer Amos Oz (1939–2018), Black Box appeared in Hebrew under the title Kufsah Shehorah in 1987. The novel immediately climbed to the top of the best-seller lists in Israel, breaking previously recorded book sales. It was translated… Read More ›
In Turkey, where writer Orhan Pamuk (1952– ) is a foremost intellectual figure, the novel The Black Book has been praised and attacked by both left-wing and conservative critics and columnists. The work has also generated extensive debates about Turkish… Read More ›
One of the most celebrated novels by Heinrich Böll (1917–85), Billiards at Half Past Nine appeared in 1959, the same year as The Tin Drum by Günter Grass and Speculations about Jacob by Uwe Johnson, two other seminal works of German… Read More ›
Berlin Alexanderplatz is considered by some to be the most significant urban novel in German literature. Franz Biberkopf, the protagonist of this novel by Alfred Döblin (1878–1957), is an ex-convict who gains his freedom after serving a four-year sentence in… Read More ›
Beneath the Red Banner is an unfinished autobiographical novel by Lao She (1899–1966), one of the most famous modern Chinese authors. It is also his last work, left unfinished when Lao She committed suicide before he came to develop the… Read More ›
Written in Arabic by Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh (1945– ) and translated into English as Beirut Blues by Catherine Cobham in 1995, Barid Bayrut is one of most haunting and compelling novels about enduring the day-to-day challenges of the Lebanese… Read More ›
Published first in Italian in 1957 and translated into English in 1959, The Baron in the Trees is an enchanting novel by Italo Calvino (1923–85). Because of the book’s mixture of fantasy and allegory, The Baron in the Trees is… Read More ›
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress was an instant sensation upon its publication in French. The novel by Chinese author Dai Sijie (1954– ) fictionalizes the lives of two urban youths sent to the Chinese countryside for reeducation during the… Read More ›
The novel Baltasar and Blimunda, written in 1984, advanced José Saramago (1922–2010) from national popularity to international recognition. The historical novel was translated from the Portuguese into English by Giovanni Pontiero in 1986. José Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize… Read More ›
Badenheim 1939 is a skillful fictional answer to the question that many have asked about the Holocaust: Why was there not more resistance? Perhaps the answer to the question is something much more simple than has been considered, as Holocaust… Read More ›
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