Comrade Papa by GauZ’, translated by Frank Wynne
My second time reviewing GauZ’ for TMR is another success; I sincerely hope to read more of his work in translation in the future.
My second time reviewing GauZ’ for TMR is another success; I sincerely hope to read more of his work in translation in the future.
The daughter finds her mother’s notebook, sewn into her pillow, and begins to investigate a figure from her revolutionary past: a man named Paul Polotsky, who lived in Paris in the 1950s. Back in Paris, she manages to track him down and begins to follow him, her life narrowing on this sole focus. What, exactly, was the relationship between her mother and Polotsky?
Political poetry is crucial to the Palestinian literary tradition, embodied perhaps most famously by the poet and author Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), who was displaced as a child during the Nakba. This rich literary tradition also includes Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972), displaced to Lebanon in 1948 and assassinated by the Mossad at the age of 36. Many readers are familiar with Refaat Alareer, the poet and literature professor whose poem “If I Must Die” was circulated widely after his assassination in 2023. His colleague and close friend, Mosab Abu Toha, enters this impressive lineage with his debut collection, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear.
A competitive swimmer and university student in Toronto is selected to attend a summer training program in Bordeaux. In the meantime, her volatile and domineering coach puts her through bizarre, painful rituals at his apartment, nominally designed to release her of her impurities.
Part memoir, part critique of the expectations of the genre, Danny Ramadan’s Crooked Teeth opens with a discussion of trust.
Told through poetry, prose, conversations, and medical reports, this novel is an achronological assemblage, its structural innovation suggesting the messiness of pregnancy and early motherhood, the struggle to make sense of it as it happens.
In a coastal city, a displaced woman, having searched for her missing daughter in vain for weeks, throws herself into the ocean. Another woman, pregnant with her first child, witnesses the suicide. In the first part of the book, a spiral-like structure with the disappearance at its center documents the weeks before and after the …
A funny, fast-paced, and poignant take on Franco-African history, as told through the eyes of three African security guards in Paris.
Prophet Song offers a shocking vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.
Exploring the natural world with wonder and reverence, this compassionate, deeply inquisitive epic reaches outward to confront the great questions of existence, while looking inward to illuminate the human heart.
A dazzling story of modern Nigeria and two families caught in the riptides of wealth, power, romantic obsession, and political corruption from the celebrated author of “Stay with Me”.
The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.
Clementine’s Take: In the late 18th century, the formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife Patience establish a small colony on an island off the coast of Maine. Over a century later, their descendants and a few others still live on the island – a group of about twenty semi-self-sufficient mixed-race islanders. A few …
A beautiful, haunting novel, in which nothing is quite as it seems, Old God’s Time is about what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us.