Alexandrian Summer By Yitzhak Gormezano Goren Translated by Yardenne Greenspan New Vessel Press, 200 pages, $15.99 Late in Israeli writer Yitzhak Gormezano Goren’s luminous 1978 novel “Alexandrian Summer,” which has just been published for the first time in English in a fluid translation by Yardenne Greenspan, a tired rabbi watches disapprovingly as a group of…
By Kamel Daoud, translated from the French by John Cullen Other Press, 160 Pages, $14.95 Kamel Daoud kick-starts his novel with the line “Mama’s still alive today,” turning inside out the celebrated opening of Albert Camus’s “The Stranger”: “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.” What would Camus say were he alive today,…
Before he started writing, novelist and journalist Tom Rachman had a peculiar visual image: A child being led into a room with a couple of adults who pay no special attention to her. The person who brings her there leaves, and the child sits quietly in a corner. As the hours pass, it becomes clear…
South African Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer, an uncompromising moralist who became one of the most powerful voices against the injustices of apartheid, has died, her family said on Monday. Gordimer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, died peacefully at her Johannesburg home on Sunday evening in the presence of her…
● I Pity the Poor Immigrant: A Novel By Zachary Lazar Little, Brown and Company, 256 pages, $25 In photographs from my high school years, I’m often blinking against the light. My smile and shut eyes look like an evasion of the camera’s flash, of the picture itself. Looking now at that face, I imagine…
A best-selling German satirical novel about the return of Adolf Hitler to modern-day Germany is being adapted into a film. “Er Ist Wieder Da,” German for “He’s Back,” sold 1.3 million copies in Germany after its 2012 release. In the book, Hitler awakens in modern-day Berlin and garners enough attention to become host of his…
Are there toilets on the Temple Mount? I needed to find out. You see, a main character in a novel I was writing, “In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist,” is a toilet cleaner on the Temple Mount. Naturally, I wanted to know what the bathroom area looked like. As much as possible, I wanted the…
Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge By Peter Orner Little, Brown, 208 pages, $16.99 Every seasoned author has overarching themes that he or she explores, to success or failure, across a series of books. Mediocrity and defeat — twin afflictions that beset the narrators in Peter Orner’s mournful and moving fiction — are worthy companions,…
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