If you don’t speak French, you’re not going to read the real text, you’re going to have to settle for Anglicized idioms. (The author spoke Russian, Polish, Yiddish, German, French, English, and Bulgarian, and then his confession he said he tried to learn Swahili, but who knows, really.) But even
The opening lines of Hédi Kaddour’s poem “New Wine” create the colorful, tangible atmosphere characteristic of his work. Employing surprising descriptions of his everyday world, the narrator of each poem in Kaddour’s collection Treason, translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker, pulls the reader into an environment which is both entirely new and familiar.
Although this month’s Global and International Studies theme suggests a look at places far afield from home, in the US, where people come every day in search of a new life, international studies can be found even in the interactions of neighbors or a walk through a town or city. Claudia Gryvatz Copquin’s The Neighborhoods of Queens is an in-depth look at Queens, covering every neighborhood throughout the borough.
You probably have ten different places to be today, or at least it feels like it. Although that may be a little overwhelming, it’s a familiar feeling. A neatly cluttered schedule—that’s modern life, and perhaps you’re even proud of it. To the title character of Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, however, you
Many early perceptions of French culture saw France as “a secondary player or latecomer” to the Renaissance. Kings, Queens, and Courtiers: Art in Early Renaissance France, edited by Martha Wolff, asserts that French aristocrats and artists formed their artistic identity “by means of selective assimilation” and deserves a place as an originator of the Renaissance.
Adina Hoffman’s biography of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Al, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, is not a love story. Instead, it is a story of loss and how from that loss Taha has created art. Amira became a “muse” in Taha’s work, a symbol of everything his family lost when they became refugees; indeed, it was everything.
Before the trois-couleurs, before the Eiffel Tower, before the Larousse Gastronomique, a 15th-century artist named Jean Fouquet was at work creating images that were utterly and exclusively French – though, at that time, saying “That is so… French!” might not have been very meaningful to many people. In a new book entitled Jean Fouquet and the Invention of France: Art and Nation after the Hundred Years War, Erik Inglis shows us that Fouquet was, in fact, shaping a national identity through his court painting for Charles VII and Louis XI.
An interview with Janet Malcolm is a rare thing. Malcolm’s latest book, Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial, recounts the sensational murder trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, a young physician in Queens convicted in 2009 for arranging the public assassination of her husband in front of their four year-old daughter. We sat down with the author for special insight into her experiences observing the court drama and writing this fascinating account.
With the Arab Spring affecting up to twenty nations, depending on the source, it is hard to know which warrants the most interest or concern. Victoria Clark, author of Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes, argues that the United States needs to make understanding Yemen a priority or risk the cultivation of more terrorists.
What symbols do you wear every day? Does your haircut symbolize your gender? Are you wearing a ring to tell the world you’re married, you graduated from a certain college, or just that you can afford it? In A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America, Leila Ahmed explores the trend of Muslim women embracing the veil since the 1970s after at least four decades of going bareheaded.