Magnificent Octopus

The Angst-Ridden Executive , by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, is a madcap romp of a mystery, Catalan-style. (Is that a great cover design or wha...

Time This line is the present. That line you just read is the past (It fell behind after you read it) The rest of the poem is the futu...

"To arrive at a bar where the principal spectacle is the clientele..." Reading The Angst-Ridden Executive , by Manuel Vázquez M...

Hopelessness was no impediment to hope. American War , by Omar El Akkad, is not my kind of book. Or maybe it is. That is, I would not have...

Happy International Women's Day! Portrait of a Woman She must be a variety. Change so that nothing will change. It's easy, impo...

Often it sickened me to hear people speak their native tongues fluently. It was as if they were unable to think and feel anything but what t...

Hello, he said. What you reading? Elisabeth showed him her empty hands. Does it look like I'm reading anything? she said. Always b...

I'm tired, she says. It's only two miles, Elisabeth says. That's not what I mean, she says. I'm tired of the news. I...

There's a place that as kid you called the farthestmost point — the most distant you could get, the place that when you stood there you ...

Imagine, she had told Control next, that language is only part of a method of communication. Imagine that it isn't even the important pa...

Recalling what a joy The Idiot , by Elif Batuman, was to read. Weeks on, I'm fuzzy on some of the details, but still talking about it.

Nothing special has happened today; no one can say she was more provoked than usual. It is only that every day one grows a little, every day...

"I am not a writer, I am an atmosphere," Lúcio Cardoso quipped. Brazilian, gay, and by all accounts larger than life. And this b...

It's hard to explain, especially since, in the Meneses family, Timóteo was far from being its dullest or its least unusual member, on th...

I found myself thinking about a girl from school, Meredtih Wittman who had lived on the same floor as me and Hannah and Angela, though the f...

In secondhand bookshops, he's sell the books he'd lovingly collected over the years in exchange for a pittance, and then he drank hi...

The trees whipped past, the same trees that I had observed from a middle-aged woman's car. Now I was that woman, but I was speeding wild...

"One day, in the garden, he told me that a sin is almost always something very tiny, a grain of sand, a nothing—but that it can destroy...

"The Bath" is a substantial short story that starts off Where Europe Begins , a collection of Yoko Tawada's work. Have you e...

Twist , by Harkaitz Cano, is billed as a crime novel cum political thriller. In my view, it's more subtle than that: it's a meditati...