The third novel by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) returns to themes earlier explored in his semiautobiographical first novel, Confessions of a Mask. The title, a euphemism for homosexuality roughly equivalent to “forbidden love,” frankly announces the novel’s subject matter… Read More ›
The Flounder is a 4,000-year-long history of the sexes, based loosely on the Grimms’ fairy tale “The Fisherman and His Wife.” The narrator of this novel by Germany’s highly revered writer Günter Grass (1927–2015) is a present-day man, Edek, who,… Read More ›
Regarded as the author’s most elaborate novel, with a vision, scope, and breadth befitting its topic, The First Circle addresses the recurrent theme of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn‘s oeuvre, namely the “internal freedom” which even the most totalitarian of political and cultural… Read More ›
The Feast of the Goat, the seminal work by Mario Vargas Llosa (1936– ), describes the end of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s regime in the Dominican Republic. The novel begins in the present day with the return of Urania Cabral to… Read More ›
Fatelessness is the first novel of Imre Kertész (1929–2016), a work that played a significant part in the author’s receipt of the 2002 Nobel Prize in literature. A novel about a Hungarian-Jewish adolescent boy who is deported to Auschwitz and… Read More ›
This is the first book in a two-novel set about life on the remote and isolated Ulvaskog farm in Småland, Sweden, at the end of the 19th century. The young farmer Adolf and his family are the fourth generation to… Read More ›
The Spanish author Camilo José Cela (1916–2002) started his successful first novel in 1940 and finished it in 1942. After being rejected by several editors, the book was published in Burgos, Spain, in 1942, and it caused immediate opposing reactions…. Read More ›
Published simultaneously in Yiddish and English, the novel The Family Moskat uses straightforward narrative as well as letters and diary entries to cover the decline of a well-to-do Jewish family, the Moskats, living in a shtetl (village) in Warsaw, Poland…. Read More ›
This important work by Chinese author Ba Jin (a pen name for Li Feigan) tells an extremely intriguing and memorable story that is often taught in history courses. One snowy night, two young men hurry home. They wear the same… Read More ›
The Fall, the last novel penned by the Algerian- born French writer Albert Camus (1913–60) prior to his winning the 1957 Nobel Prize in literature, was written as a series of monologues delivered by a French expatriate and former lawyer… Read More ›
The majority of the characters drawn by the writer Isabel Allende (1942– ) possess some special talent or attribute. Eva Luna, the protagonist of the novel Eva Luna, is not an exception to that rule. In this novel, Allende experiments… Read More ›
Written by the brilliant Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho (1947– ), Eleven Minutes was originally published in Portuguese. This novel differs from the rest of the writer’s oeuvre as it deals with a subject which, Coelho states in the book’s dedication,… Read More ›
Martín Luis Guzmán’s (1887– 1977) best-known novel owes much to the genre of historical fiction, but it is often described as a seminal novel of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. The Eagle and the Serpent, first published in Spain in 1928… Read More ›
Often hailed as Argentina’s national epic and an elegy for a lost frontier past, Don Segundo Sombra is also regarded as the masterpiece of Ricardo Güiraldes (1886–1927). Completed and published just before his death, this novel brought Güiraldes the fame… Read More ›
Considered Venezuela’s “national novel,” Doña Bárbara vividly depicts the classic struggle between civilization and nature. Its author, Rómulo Gallegos (1884–1969), was an important statesman, educator, and public figure during the first half of the 20th century, and his political service… Read More ›
In Dog Years, the German novelist Günter Grass (1927–2015) gives his readers a panoramic view of German mentality before, during, and after World War II. The third book of the Danzig Trilogy, this work, following The Tin Drum and Cat and… Read More ›
The Doctor’s Wife by Sawako Ariyoshi (1931–86) gives a fictional account of the life of Hanaoka Seishū, who lived from 1760 to 1835 and performed the first known operation under anesthesia in 1805, 37 years before the use of ether… Read More ›
The creative portrayal of Germany’s descent into evil comes to life in the pages of the acclaimed postwar novel by Thomas Mann (1875–1955), Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer, Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend. This complex novel… Read More ›
Divided Heaven, the second novel by German author Christa Wolf (1929–2011) became an immediate best seller and a critical success upon publication: The initial 160,000 copies and 10 editions sold out within a few months. Divided Heaven chronicles Rita Seidel’s… Read More ›
The Disciple, one of Paul Bourget’s (1852–1935) greatest literary achievements and his most famous novel, marked a change in the author’s literary development. Prior to this work, his fiction consisted of highly dramatic tales set in high society; with The… Read More ›
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