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Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new work compels readers to pay attention to the dissolution of animal life and our reliance on it, to the ends of relationships, to the shortness of the human life span, and to the book’s own looming narrative endpoint. In this novel, all things have an end.
In the world of fiction, as opposed to the real world and its assumed male passiveness, men must make choices; they are not victims, but the owners of their mistakes.
Poetry as life and death—may I term this struggle as survival? Seán Ó Ríordáin, the Irish poet whose oeuvre elucidates this limbo, looks no further than to the interaction of light with dark to explain this compulsion for the letter as both cure and curse.
Olga Tokarczuk’s newly translated novel has been marketed as a murder mystery, albeit a strange one. It is that, partly, but underneath the whodunit is another novel: one about how our obsession with usefulness leads to greed, and the devastating impact of both on the environment.
Leila Chatti’s poems subvert the expectation that she, as a Tunisian American writer, write as “just” Tunisian or “just” American—or just as the Tunisian American writer for whom mixed identity itself is the chief subject and source of conflict in her work.
Curtis Bauer is a poet and translator of prose and poetry from Spanish. He is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a Banff International Literary Translation Centre fellowship. His translation of Jeannette Clariond’s Image of Absence won the International Latino Book Award for Best Nonfiction Book Translation from Spanish to English. Bauer teaches creative writing…
Translation from the Spanish by D. P. Snyder At first, I didn’t realize what was happening or what was going to happen. I was breastfeeding my baby. Newborn and adorable, her hands so rosy and white resting there on my breast. As she grew, she got stronger and stronger. There were days when I…
Translation from the Spanish by Curtis Bauer There’s nothing worse than an extraordinary story coming out of the mouth of a mediocre narrator, and that was Eduviges, Señor Ramiro’s assistant, who came to fix my water heater because Señor Ramiro was sick. While he struggled with the igniting mechanism, he told me about his…
D. P. Snyder is a bilingual writer and translator from Spanish. Her translations have appeared in the Southern Review, Exile Quarterly, Two Lines Journal, the Sewanee Review, World Literature Today, and Latin American Literature in Translation, among others. Her translation of Mónica Lavín’s “Coyoacán a la carte” was nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize. Recent…
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