PositiveRTE (IRE)So, legends come to life in this fine collection and stirring sights from the past are evoked again. The range is diverse, from the utterly unique sci-fi of Moderan, the title story in David R Bunch\'s collection, first published in 1971, to the work of Jessica Mitford and Mavis Gallant. There are pieces by the Russian author Vasily Grossman, the Sicilian Leonard Sciasia and the Finnish Tove Jansson, and everything is engrossing and piquant in a bite-sized way ... In a foreword to the anthology, editor Edwin Frank describes it as an itinerary or road book, rather than a \'greatest hits.\' It will accordingly prove useful as a navigation guide for the reader in search of some slightly neglected writers, whose books are still published by NYRB. Recommended.
Richard Ford
RaveRTE (IRE)The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford returns with nine profound stories of love and grief , tales that are exhilarating, reflective and intricately coiled as felt life is ... Though coolly narrated, the stories and novels have always been passionately invested in the way people really think inside their murky, fair-to-middling streams of consciousness. The author has a keen ear for the cadences of speech, and he can specify the required tone in a jiffy, mid-sentence, with an alert eye for the slightest nuance ... Ford is an exciting writer, there is no better adjective - you read him wondering all the time what the next paragraph will bring, and you only stop really to re-read certain sentences to savour their peculiar richness.
Julio Ramon Ribeyro, Trans. by Katherine Silver
PositiveRTE (IRL)Elegance in the formal design skillfully contains the chaotic lives of Ribeyro\'s characters. As author, he strikes the required distance enabling him to situate best these refined tales in which shame, humiliation, unbridled lust, infatuation, or plain derangement throb just beneath the skin of his creations ... On the other hand, Ribeyro seems almost indefatigable in the imaginative heights to which he scales in a more ambitious and lengthier \'Silvio in El Rosedal\', perhaps the most mysterious tale in the collection ... It would be misleading to believe that Ribeyro confined himself to skewering bourgeoisie pretensions or that he was interested only in the prosperous denizens of Peru. In a letter to his editor, he once expressed his goal, which was to speak for \'the marginalised, the forgotten, those condemned to an existence without harmony and without voice.\' Hence, the title of the selection ...The story \'At the Foot of the Cliff\', with its indigent, struggling beach dwellers living in shacks assembled from scrap iron and stone best exemplifies this thread in Ribeyro\'s work.
