Hester velmans biography of martin luther king
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In , two publishing giants—Penguin and Farrar, Straus and Giroux—sent Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen’s collected memoirs, The Copenhagen Trilogy, out into the world. A huge hit upon release, readers praised Ditlevsen’s emotional power, her passionate dedication to the life of words, her wry humour, and her uncanny, incisive gift for description. Long celebrated in her home country, Ditlevsen had taken a long time to find the same audience in the English language—and it is largely thanks to the dedication and prowess of her translator, Tiina Nunnally, that we were finally able to meet this brilliant mind on the page. Now, in this essay, Nunnally tells the story of the discursive journey that the Trilogy took to its now-massive Anglophone audience, and how Ditlevsen opened up the way for her to change her life.
At the end of Youth, the second volume of her collected memoirs, The Copenhagen Trilogy, Danish author Tove Ditlevsen receives a copy of her first published book, a slim
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A Review of Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar. Little, Brown and Company,
Regardless of where we think we fall on the continuum of civility, one thing is certain, we can’t assume that we understand others automatically or that they understand us. In the places where we cross paths with strangers, faulty perceptions and skewed conclusions are ever-present. Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies does a brilliant job of playing out this conundrum in the experience of immigration.
The author considers himself authentically American, a child born in the United States and a man shaped in its culture. But he is also an immigrant son, and that allows him to see a complication in American identity. In the words of one of his characters Akhtar says, “The thing I never got used to here was not really understanding what people are thinking. Everybody coming from so many different places, so many different experiences, everybody looking at the same things in completely different ways.” We are a nat
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Globetrotting
Argentina
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A gay high school teacher in s Buenos Aires tries to keep a low profile as his friends and students begin to disappear.
By Guillermo Saccomanno. Translated from the Spanish bygd Andrea G. Labinger. Available Feb. 12 from Open Letter Books.
Austria
Abel and Cain
First published in , Rezzori’s “The Death of My Brother Abel” is released this year with a posthumously published prequel.
By Gregor Von Rezzori. Translated from the German by David Dollenmayer, Joachim Neugroschel and Marshall Yarbrough. Available April 9 from New York Review Books.
Poland
Accommodations
A girl in search of herself leaves her childhood village, a close-knit agricultural community, for a nearby city where she moves between a hostel and a mysterious nuns’ convent.
bygd Wioletta Greg. Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft. Available July 9 from Transit Books.
Sweden
Acts of Infidelity
A ung woman who begins an affair wi