Reviews

Bloom’s translations of these plays remind us that Camus was not a philosopher who used theater to illustrate arguments like Sartre, but a tragic thinker for whom drama was a fundamental and necessary means of literalizing political and ethical metaphors.

Considered together, these novels trace the triumph of consumerism over rebellion, the bourgeoisie over the underclass, capital over life.

Memoir is less common territory for Darrieussecq, but with insomnia, she has found a real-world subject appropriate for her ongoing concerns about making sense of the absurd.

All three poets contemplate the female body and the voice both literally and metaphorically, appealing to outside powers as they ponder how much a person can bear.

“You were a cop and then a robber and a cop again,” recalls Officer Munson. And on this fateful night, he wants Carney to play again, this time with deadly stakes.

Between a stream-of-consciousness-inspired prose, image patterns, and consistent pivots of thought, Kanai establishes the most surprising thing about this novel: its ability to make the vertiginous hypnotic.

But while Cather’s eponymous Antonia rises above rumor and gossip through resilience, optimism, and an irresistibly endearing authenticity, forging happiness on her own terms, the story of Kielland’s Belle is alternatively uncomfortable and haunting.

Here, what is given, what is taken or refuted, what is owed engenders the myriad methods her characters use to shift responsibility or culpability away from themselves and onto others.