Ruth Margalit | The New York Review of Books

The Best Time of His Life

Vinson Cunningham’s novel Great Expectations is nominally about the experiences of an Obama campaign staffer but is really a glimpse into the formation of a critical mind.

Great Expectations

by Vinson Cunningham

June 6, 2024 issue

Writing the Nakba in Hebrew

Arabesques is Anton Shammas’s lament for the catastrophe of 1948 and his paean to Hebrew and Arabic, languages he has spent a lifetime navigating between.

Arabesques

by Anton Shammas, translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden, with an afterword by Elias Khoury

April 20, 2023 issue

Village People

Halldór Laxness, Iceland’s Nobel laureate, was an inexhaustibly prolific chronicler of impoverished village life, though he never got over the impracticality of literature.

Salka Valka

by Halldór Laxness, translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton

Independent People

by Halldór Laxness, translated from the Icelandic by J. A. Thompson, with an introduction by John Freeman

November 24, 2022 issue

Trains to Nowhere

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s novel The Passenger dwells on the hopeless roaming of a wealthy Jewish Berliner in the days immediately following Kristallnacht.

The Passenger

by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, translated from the German by Philip Boehm, with a preface by André Aciman

November 18, 2021 issue

The Mystical Realist

Jon Fosse’s Septology is suffused with religious symbolism, taking on, in its incantatory language and repetitions, the rhythm of the rosary.

The Other Name: Septology I–II

by Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls

I Is Another: Septology III–V

by Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls

September 23, 2021 issue

Women Not at Home

Ronit Matalon’s Israeli novels follow immigrant families much like her own.

The Sound of Our Steps

by Ronit Matalon, translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu

The One Facing Us

by Ronit Matalon, translated from the Hebrew by Marsha Weinstein

And the Bride Closed the Door

by Ronit Matalon, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen

November 5, 2020 issue

Pandemic Journal

Dispatches from around the world documenting the coronavirus outbreak

April 23, 2020 issue

Pandemic Journal, March 17–22

Dispatches on the coronavirus outbreak from Madeleine Schwartz in Brooklyn, Anne Enright in Dublin, Joshua Hunt in Busan, Anna Badkhen in Lalibela, Lauren Groff in Gainesville, and more.

March 22, 2020