Where is your nonfiction section please.
Book review: The Ravine, by Wendy Lower & Those Who Forget, by Geraldine Schwarz In her new book The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed, Wendy Lower, a historian with extensive work around the Holocaust, is put onto an intriguing research journey: Lower encountered an extremely rare photograph depicting the murder of... Continue Reading →
I think I look forward more to putting together my list of backlist favorites each year than the new releases. What was better for you this year -- new releases or older nonfiction? Borrowed Finery, by Paula Fox - Children's novelist Fox's memoir is brilliant, especially for memoir that's non-linear and kind of hazy in... Continue Reading →
How's your reading for Women in Translation Month? I haven't actually read anything new in translation yet this month, but I can recommend three fantastic memoirs by women in translation that I've read recently. Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman's Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany, by Marie Jalowicz Simon, translated... Continue Reading →
It's August, which means: Women in Translation month! This is far and away my favorite literary event of the year. Meytal Radzinski of Bibliobio began this initiative in 2014, which serves to increase awareness of and engagement with translated works written by women. Female-authored books comprise only around 30% of those translated into English each... Continue Reading →
Let Them Eat Pancakes, by Craig Carlson (Amazon) In his first memoir, the delightful Pancakes in Paris, Californian Craig Carlson details his life-changing journey of opening "my diner in a foreign country, with a foreign language, which also happened to be the culinary capital of the world." It made for an entertaining, sarcastic but heartwarming... Continue Reading →
Au Revoir, Tristesse: Lessons in Happiness from French Literature, by Viv Groskop This, then, is a book about the intersection between Frenchness and happiness through reading, as that is a place I have always found great comfort. My hope is to demonstrate, through the French writers I first discovered in my teens and twenties, how... Continue Reading →
Finding Dora Maar, by Brigitte Benkemoun, translated from French by Jody Gladding (Amazon / Book Depository) Author Brigitte Benkemoun's husband lost his Hermes agenda so she bought him a vintage replacement on eBay. When it arrived, she noticed that its old pages were intact. They dated back to 1951, an address book filled with a... Continue Reading →
Diary of a Foreigner in Paris, by Curzio Malaparte (Amazon / Book Depository) Italian war correspondent and author Curzio Malaparte is such an oddball figure. I really enjoyed his book Kaputt, about his experiences as a war correspondent in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, but I remember being unsure what was fiction and... Continue Reading →
I only finished two of these, but I'm going to tell you about all three anyway. First up is a new release that's a read-in-one-sitting deal, in case you want a quick but fairly intense and even gritty read: Phyllis Grant's Everything is Under Control. Grant was a dancer training at Julliard, living in New... Continue Reading →
Book review: A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway (Amazon / Book Depository) There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties,... Continue Reading →
One post of new nonfiction to look forward to is never enough, so here's a second roundup of some upcoming titles in 2020 that have caught my eye. This time I've got macabre science stories, tales of obsession, badass women of World War II, current social and political commentary, multiple trips to Paris and Siberia,... Continue Reading →
If new nonfiction this year was a little lackluster, I did feel more enthusiastic about the backlist titles I read throughout the year. It was one of these that was my absolute favorite and the best book I read this year: Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, by Kapka Kassabova - Kassabova returned... Continue Reading →
