John Klassen
Mario Benedetti (1920-2009)
Benedetti was an influential member of Uruguay’s Generation of 1945, an intellectual and literary movement that included Juan Carlos Onetti and Amanda Berenguer, among others and which preceded the Latin American Boom of the 60s and 70s. The Truce was the inspiration for the 1974 film of the same name, the first Argentinean film to be nominated for an Academy Award (for Best Foreign Film). The novel is one of over ninety-five works of poetry, fiction, drama, and essays that Benedetti wrote during his lifetime, very little of which has been translated into English.
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John Klassen
Jenny Erpenbeck
Erpenbeck (1967-) was born in East Berlin. She became an opera director and has several productions to her credit. In the 1990s she turned to writing and became a substantial literary presence with her books: The Old Child, The Book of Words, Visitation, The End of Days.
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John Klassen
David Vann
Vann (1966-) was born in Alaska. He is a novelist and short story writer, and now professor of creative writing at the University of Warwick in England. He has received a long list of international literary prizes. Vann describes himself as a "neoclassical writer" and says, "My novels are all Greek tragedies...".
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John Klassen
Colm Toibin
Toibin (1955-) is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist and critic. House of Names is Toibin's eleventh book. Other popular novels include The Master, The Blackwater Lightship, Brooklyn, The Testament of Mary, Nora Webster.
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Monsieur le Commandant de Romain Slocombe : un livre qui dérange.
NiL éditions, Paris, 2011
Paul-Jean Husson, décoré de la première guerre, académicien connu, écrivain-poète célèbre et ami du maréchal Pétain, signe cette longue lettre adressée, en 1942, au commandant SS d'une sous-préfecture de Haute-Normandie.
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John Klassen
David Grossman
Grossman (1954-) is an Israeli author.. He has written a number of fiction and non-fiction books, and has garnered a long list of literary prizes, the most recent being the International Man Booker for his novel: A Horse Walks into a Bar.
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John Klassen
Hideo Yokoyama
Yokoyama (1957-) worked for twelve years as an investigative reporter for a regional newspaper in Japan before turning to crime fiction. He has written six books. Six Four sold a million copies in the first six days when it was published in Japan; it is the first of Yokoyama's novels to be translated into English.
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John Klassen
J.G. Farrell
Farrell (1935-1979) was born in Liverpool, of Irish descent. He died at 44, swept out to sea while fishing from the shore in Ireland. Farrell wrote eight novels (two published posthumously), but he is best known for the Empire Trilogy: Troubles (1970), The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), and The Singapore Grip (1978). The overarching theme of the Trilogy, which is clearly on display in Troubles, is the human and political consequences and costs of British colonial rule.
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Eric Ambler (1909-1998) was a British author, and screenwriter, best known for his thriller/spy novels. In many of his novels, the protagonist is rarely a professional spy, a police officer, or a counter-intelligence operative; he is, instead, an amateur who finds himself haphazardly and unwillingly in the company of criminals or spies with real threats to his life. This is very much the approach of The Mask of Dimitrios (first published in 1939) which is often cited as one of the best of Ambler's novels. test
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John Klassen
FICTION
Robert Harris: Cicero Trilogy: Imperium, Lustrum, Dictator
Historical fiction that brings alive the time, place, society, and personalities that defined the evolution of Rome and its empire, all framed through the life of one of the main protagonists. Cicero had neither family name, nor wealth, nor military exploits to his credit; what he did have was overweening ambition, a brilliant mind, and peerless ability as an orator, that let him scheme and manipulate and sway individuals and mobs. Life was a malestrom of shifting fortunes and political climates in which Cicero survived a long time, in and out of the pinnacles of influence and power, but in the end, he paid with his life. Not only excellent history but, in Harris's hands, page-turners that are hard to put down.
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