The Kingdom of This World, the second novel by Cuban author Alejo Carpentier (1904–80), deals with the events surrounding the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). The novel is divided into four sections, each of which chronicles an important stage in the country’s… Read More ›
Originally published in Russian in 1928 under the penname Sirin, King, Queen, Knave is the second novel by famed author Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977). The work was translated into English in 1968 after its publication in Germany. Unlike his first novel,… Read More ›
The 1932 publication of the cynical and darkly comic Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) sent immediate shock waves into a French literary world still reeling from the social and artistic disruptions of World War… Read More ›
The series of four biblical novels by renowned German author Thomas Mann (1875–1955) chronicles the ancient history of the Jews and evolves as a refutation of prolific racist mythmaking during the Nazi era. Mann wrote the tetralogy over a 16-year… Read More ›
Born in Brest, France, into a family with a strong background in the sciences, Alain Robbergrillet (1922–2008) was an agricultural engineer by training but became one of the leading exponents of what was known as the nouveau roman, or “new… Read More ›
The third novel by Italian author Umberto Eco (1932–2016), The Island of the Day Before is another extended meditation on the subjective nature of reality that demonstrates the deceptive nature of all signs and metaphors. Eco presents his historical romance… Read More ›
Inspired by his fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel The Invention of Morel is on one level a stoic evocation of the pains and frustrations of romantic love and on another level a profound metaphysical… Read More ›
The novel Nausea (Le nausée, 1938) and the collection of short stories and novellas The Wall (Le mur, 1939), which includes Intimacy, brought the French author Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) immediate recognition and success as a writer and philosopher. Previously, he… Read More ›
The Interpreters is the first of two novels written by the prominent Nigerian intellectual Wole Soyinka (1934– ). He is best known for his prolific career as a playwright, already well established at the time of the publication of The… Read More ›
The reclusive French writer Marcel Proust, now considered by many scholars as the greatest novelist of the 20th century, labored for more than 14 years and died while still adding to what would eventually be a seven-volume masterpiece. The novel… Read More ›
Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s book “Infante’s Inferno” (1984) is a masterfully crafted, chronological account of a young man’s journey into adulthood in prerevolutionary Havana, Cuba. The author vividly depicts both the triumphant and disastrous aspects of his experiences, interweaving his trademark… Read More ›
The Italian author Alberto Moravia (1907–90) began writing his masterpiece The Indifferent Ones in 1925, when he was 17 years old. Publication came in 1929, when he was 21. The Indifferent Ones is the story of a Roman bourgeois family… Read More ›
With I’m Not Stiller, the author’s third novel, the Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch (1911–91) established himself as a major contributor to postwar German literature. The English title is also the first sentence of the novel, whose central themes… Read More ›
Despite André Gide’s claims otherwise, his novel The Immoralist is clearly autobiographical. Gide (1869–1951), one of the most significant novelists of the first half of the 20th century and winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in literature, went to great… Read More ›
This novel by the famed Italian author Primo Levi (1919–87) can be read on multiple levels. First, it is an exciting story, with the heroes (and heroines), a roving resistance band of Jews, trying whenever possible to wreak havoc in… Read More ›
A satire on human foibles from the standpoint of a cat, I Am a Cat is one of the most original novels of the Wagahai wa Neko de aru, one of the best loved works by the Japanese writer Natsume… Read More ›
With her controversial 1986 novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, one of the most respected of Guadeloupe’s several powerful writers, Maryse Condé 1934– ) has produced one of the African diaspora’s literary classics. I, Tituba explores the interwoven psychosocial,… Read More ›
I, the Supreme is based on the life of Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1766–1840). Francia came to power in 1811, and in 1814 he designated himself “perpetual dictator.” He ruled Paraguay with a stern hand and violent… Read More ›
As a major literary figure and significant contributor to not only literature of the developing world but to world literature in general, Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012 ) is a vital literary tour de force, providing the world outside of Latin America… Read More ›
The first novel by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende (1942– ), The House of the Spirits remains the author’s best-known and most popular work, despite the subsequent success of her following novels, memoirs, and children’s books. Although the book received… Read More ›
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