About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Stefan Hertmans, Trans. by David McKay
Positive The Jewish Chronicle If your idea of a good holiday read is something emotionally unchallenging and mentally untaxing, then on no account pick up this book ... is as demanding of the reader’s imagination as it is of his or her concentration ... Written in an often breathless, continuous present tense, Hamoutal’s experiences are visualised following Hertmans’s own groundbreaking researches ... Written in an often breathless, continuous present tense, Hamoutal’s experiences are visualised following Hertmans’s own groundbreaking researches.
Johannes Anyuru, Trans. By Rachel Wilson-Broyle
Positive The Independent (UK) In part the story of a search for identity, in part mourning its loss in that of a father, family, homeland across two generations the lyrical longing of the writing countenances a globalised world in which everywhere could be anywhere, where nobody is wholly at home ... Sentimentality is averted by the lyricism of the language and a skill for surprises ... Anyuru\'s searingly poetic style rescues his writing from bleakness and sentimentality alike as he confronts the lies we live by.
Daša Drndić, translated by Celia Hawkesworth
Rave The Times Literary Supplement Drndić moves beyond a stream of consciousness to capture thought processes in interaction with the written word. Her method is to amass \'fragments\' of contemporary material: the descriptive power resides in its selection and omissions ... Her incisive skill and radical style render potentially grim reading compulsive. She was a voice of – and for – our times.
Mircea Eliade trans. Christopher Bartholomew
Positive The Times Literary Supplement What Eliade gives us is an evocative if disquieting slice of his early life and times ... However retrospectively adapted, Eliade’s two slim volumes of juvenilia anticipate much of what now passes for life-writing, auto­fiction or even creative non-fiction. Neither was intended for publication and both only appeared some fifty years later ... It is high time that a significant author who spoke, read or wrote in eight languages should have the full scope of his work represented in English.