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Nov 19, 2024 | 
vulture.com | Bailey Trela
More than any other contemporary writer, Haruki Murakami has become the poster boy for a particular type of global novel — deracinated, stripped of local references that might stump international audiences, and generally written in a simplified form of its original language, the better to ease the process of translation. Odd as they are, his works epitomize a brand of contemporary fiction that’s been shaped, in one way or another, by the market forces resulting from 21st-century globalization.
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Sep 26, 2024 | 
clereviewofbooks.com | Bailey Trela
There are a few obvious reasons we tend to be interested in a writer’s late works. For one, they allow us to indulge the superstition that the author is somehow more present, that the labor of their human hand is more clearly visible, whether through a generalized mental debility—the absence of youthful pyrotechnics or gracile phrasings—or by dint of their own encroaching death.
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Apr 23, 2024 | 
thebaffler.com | Bailey Trela
The Unforgivable: And Other Writings by Cristina Campo, translated from the Italian by Alex Andriesse. NYRB Classics, 288 page. 2024.
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Dec 28, 2023 | 
frieze.com | Bailey Trela
Éric Chevillard writes too much. For the past three decades and change he’s averaged roughly a book a year, only a handful of which (so far) have found their way into English. On top of that, since 2007, he’s also written three entries every day on his blog, L’autofictif, a sort of experimental journal whose title pokes fun at the perennial French fascination with autofiction and its tendency, as Chevillard sees it, to devolve into ‘complacent self-exhibition’.
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Oct 10, 2023 | 
lmtonline.com | Elsa Morante |Bailey Trela
- - - Starting in the late summer of 1943, the Italian writers Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante spent nine months hiding in the small village of Sant'Agata. Situated in an impoverished mountain region, Sant'Agata offered few amenities. The couple lived in a small hut with an earthen floor where they slept on a mattress stuffed with corn husks. In October, with cold weather approaching, Morante briefly returned to occupied Rome to fill a suitcase with warm clothes.
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Oct 10, 2023 | 
washingtonpost.com | Bailey Trela
Starting in the late summer of 1943, the Italian writers Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante spent nine months hiding in the small village of Sant’Agata. Situated in an impoverished mountain region, Sant’Agata offered few amenities. The couple lived in a small hut with an earthen floor where they slept on a mattress stuffed with corn husks. In October, with cold weather approaching, Morante briefly returned to occupied Rome to fill a suitcase with warm clothes.
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Aug 22, 2023 | 
clereviewofbooks.com | Bailey Trela
Among the many lately-rediscovered chroniclers of New York’s seamy fin de siècle, Gary Indiana is the patron saint of human detritus. His subjects are the elder statesmen of waning movements, bohemian éminences grises unable or unwilling to accept their obsolescence—at least, when they’re not actively indulging it. His great theme is that particular tint of Weltschmerz experienced by the atomized specks of a moth-eaten avant garde.
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Aug 17, 2023 | 
theparisreview.org | Bailey Trela
By Bailey Trela August 17, 2023 The Maison de Balzac is located in the sixteenth arrondissement at 47, rue Raynouard, Paris, in the heart of the former village of Passy. If you visit, chances are you’ll approach it along the rue de l’Annonciation, which is pleasantly quiet and perfectly shaded, and boasts, according to Google Maps, a Pizza Hut that I don’t remember seeing when I visited in April.
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Jun 22, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Bailey Trela |Richard Brown |John Rodden |Jennifer Banks
When Katharina leaves her job as a typesetter and begins working at a theater company, she catches the eye of a coworker, Vadim. They sleep together, just once, but that’s enough to create an almost insurmountable rift in her relationship with Hans. Both are heartbroken, and tumble into a psychologically dense cycle of forgiveness and punishment. Katharina’s penitence is immediate and somewhat theatrical.
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May 31, 2023 | 
commonwealmagazine.org | Bailey Trela |Matt McManus |Gary Dorrien |Megan Buskey
Colm Tóibín, 2022 (NurPhoto SRL/Alamy Stock Photo) For a writer of his generation, Colm Tóibín might be the closest thing to a celebrity the twenty-first century is capable of producing. The source of his popular appeal, however, can be a little tricky to pin down. Tóibín’s novels are often understated and elliptical, driven more by small human interactions than by plot.
