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Jan 17, 2025 | 
thebookerprizes.com | Ismail Kadare |Rachel Kushner |Shehan Karunatilaka |Olga Tokarczuk
If the psychological twists of The Traitors have you longing for more, these novels of ambition and betrayal will leave you questioning every motive – just like the game itself Written by Donna Mackay-Smith Publication date and time: Published January 17, 2025Murder. Banish. Recruit. With its gripping mix of seduction and strategic betrayal, BBC One’s The Traitors, a modern spin on the party game Mafia, has viewers hooked around the world.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
service95.com | Olga Tokarczuk
“The hardest thing about Olga Tokarczuk’s amazing genre-defying novel Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead is knowing how to describe it. It’s a crime novel, but much more than a mere whodunnit. It’s also a call to arms, a philosophical interrogation that is peppered with surreal mediations on astrology, and a story that will make your blood boil while simultaneously warming your heart.
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Oct 31, 2024 | 
jezebel.com | Olga Tokarczuk
I am sure if you are reading Jezebel in late-October-almost-November 2024, you are oppressively aware that there is yet another “most important election of your lifetime” happening on Tuesday—or rather, it all comes to a head on Tuesday. I am not a political pundit (thank god), but I think it’s pretty safe to say that Decision 2024 is not going to come to a neat and tidy result that everyone will accept on Wednesday morning.
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Oct 30, 2024 | 
fivebooks.com | Sally Rooney |Haruki Murakami |Rachel Kushner |Olga Tokarczuk
What are the novels everyone is talking about in Fall 2024? Well, the most obvious answer to this question is Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo. Every Rooney book is a major publishing event, and this latest offering—which centres on the fraught relationship between two Irish brothers—has received rave reviews almost across the board.
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Oct 3, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Abdulrazak Gurnah |Olga Tokarczuk |Herta Müller |Tomas Tranströmer
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
bookreporter.com | Olga Tokarczuk |Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk writes crime novels tucked neatly into the most wondrous array of interesting humans and wild thoughts imaginable. With her precise and specific language (thanks also to her translator, Antonia Lloyd-Jones), THE EMPUSIUM takes a leap from Thomas Mann’s classic, THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, and delves into the secret world of the turn-of-the-20th-century spa, a place where both mental and physical distress was to be challenged and transformed.
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Sep 19, 2024 | 
datebook.sfchronicle.com | Olga Tokarczuk |Antonia Lloyd-Jones |Chelsea Davis
“The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story” by Olga Tokarczuk. Photo: Riverhead BooksAs your doctor, I recommend you take in “The Empusium” with an open mind and a stiff pour of psychedelics. This prescription will help you keep up with the novel’s characters, a gaggle of sanatorium patients who enhance their nightly conversations with a homemade liquor that happens to be hallucinogenic.
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Sep 3, 2024 | 
electricliterature.com | Daniel Mason |Olga Tokarczuk |Antonia Lloyd-Jones |Olivia Butler
Nature as tangled forest, as oil-drenched bayou or salt desert. Nature as flux and change. In all the books discussed here, the writers use ideas of nature as backdrops for perplexing and life-changing character dilemmas. The ideas of nature are different in every case, and the protagonists are all searching for something they don’t quite understand the nature of, but the common thread is nature always presiding, abiding, inspiring and looming. Nature provoking.
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Aug 27, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Małgorzata Gorczyńska |Olga Tokarczuk |Georgi Gospodinov |Patryk Pufelski
“Poets are just as smart as generals and more dangerous.” —Danilo Kiš I. Czesław Miłosz apparently once said that the main difference between a Western and an Eastern European intellectual is that the former has never had a good kick in the ass. This rather blunt aphorism, referred to in Witold Gombrowicz’s 1953 Diary,1 sprang to mind when I saw the poem “Clay” by Tomasz Różycki in English translation in the New York Review of Books.
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Aug 14, 2024 | 
crimereads.com | Caroline Wolff |Ottessa Moshfegh |Olga Tokarczuk |Elizabeth Hand
There are so many female archetypes in literature—the femme fatale, the damsel in distress, the angel of the house. While I was writing my novel The Wayside, I was thinking a lot about (and mindfully avoiding) one trope in particular: the madwoman. Alternately an object of fear and pity, the madwoman is often erratic, occasionally violent, and usually stowed away unseen, haunting the edges of the story until some climactic moment of confrontation with the hero. She’s a foil for the pure of heart.
