During the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, the Dutch author Anna Woltz and I switched places. She was hunkered down in New York City while I followed the news from the safety (and sunny weather) of Lisbon, Portugal. But she turned her frightening experience into a page-turning novel, translated by Laura Watkinson and published by the … Continue reading Book Review: A Hundred Hours of Night
by Karen Van Drie This is a very compelling wartime diary of what a women experienced living in Berlin at the end of World War II. The keeper of this diary, which she originally published anonymously, describes the daily struggle to stay alive as her national leaders, nation-state, and city fell to an invading Soviet … Continue reading A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in a Conquered City by Anonymous
WEDNESDAY 1. No one walks through London with a machete. Unless you count the two men passing him just now. Niall had already wrapped up taking pictures of the spot where the Effra River had once emptied into the Thames, when one of the two men looked back at him. The man’s gaze lingered … Continue reading Fade to Black by Zoë Beck
Mr. Squirrel and the Moon Sebastian Meschenmoser, David Henry Wilson (Trans.) NorthSouth Books, 2015 ISBN 978-0735841567 Winter 2015 Top Ten IndieNext Pick When Mr. Squirrel awakens to find that the moon has landed on his tree, he frantically tries to get rid of it before someone suspects him of stealing it and puts him in jail. … Continue reading Title Pick: Mr. Squirrel and the Moon
Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Filkins (Trans.) Zephyr Press, 2006 ISBN 0939010844 LIBRARIES The shelves sag. The volumes are weighted down with the past. Their sweat is dust. Their impulse is rigidity. They no longer struggle. They have saved themselves upon the island of knowledge. Sometimes they've lost their conscience. Here and … Continue reading Darkness Spoken by Ingeborg Bachmann
by Marcia Lynx Qualey Originally published on Arabic Literature (in English) Arab-German literature in German doesn’t have the broad, 19th- and early-20th-century roots of Arab-American or Arab-French literatures. But it is a vibrant and growing space, surely to grow much more in the coming decades: Certainly, there were individual Arab texts written in German in the 19th century. … Continue reading 6 Arab-German Authors from a Growing Scene
A bestial Brave New World is on the horizon: Some 50,000 creatures around the globe—including whales, leopards, flamingoes, bats and snails—are being equipped with digital tracking devices. The data gathered and studied by major scientific institutes about their behavior will not only aid in conservation efforts and warn us about tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, … Continue reading Title Pick: Alexander Pschera, Animal Internet
WHEN I WAS SIX, my grandfather stopped recognizing me. He lived in the house down the hill from ours, and because I cut through his orchard on the way to school, occasionally he threw a piece of wood at me, saying I had no business on his land. Sometimes, though, he liked to see me … Continue reading The Old King in His Exile by Arno Geiger
Tonight It's Very Clear We took my car. I drove; Armin was sitting next to me and Blank was in the back seat. He sat right in the middle and he had both windows open, his hair fluttering in the wind. Just was written in large gold letters on the rear window behind him. The … Continue reading The Gentlemen’s Tailor by Marianna Leky
Eugene H. Hayworth The American film version of the novel Jakob the Liar opens with a scene that departs from the events described in the book, but depicts one of the key themes of the novel through a visual metaphor. The actor Robin Williams, as the protagonist Jakob, darts and dashes madly through the early … Continue reading Cinematic Translation on Film and Paper: A Case Study
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 