Juan Vidal
-
-
Juan Gabriel Vásquez's new novel centers on a respected and feared political cartoonist whose past comes back to haunt him after he receives a threatening letter. It's a powerful, concentrated work.
-
Alejandro Zambra's playful new novel is fashioned in the format of Chile's Academic Aptitude Test, the standardized exam high school students there take — complete with multiple choice questions.
-
The bard of America's Jazz Age died 75 years ago today, but his work is as popular as ever. Critic Juan Vidal remembers discovering Fitzgerald's work in a dusty secondhand bookshop.
-
Michael Bible's slim new novel follows a jaded, drunken priest and his chess-master sidekick on a cross country journey, along with a crowd of misfits and outliers who help give the book its charm.
-
Critic Juan Vidal says Kafka's classic tale of alienation — published 100 years ago this month — helped bring about a metamorphosis in his own life (though rather more positive than Gregor Samsa's).
-
Three novellas by some of Italy's best crime writers make up Judges. Andrea Camilleri, Carlo Lucarelli and Giancarlo De Cataldo weave tales of idealistic judges fighting crime and corruption.
-
Joseph Roth was an Austrian reporter whose writing provided a vivid portrait of pre-WWII Europe. Critic Juan Vidal says this newly translated collection of his work shows his intelligence and humor.
-
Readers everywhere are rediscovering the work of Brazil's Clarice Lispector. Critic Juan Vidal calls Lispector a singular artist, whose newly collected stories linger in the mind like poetry.
-
Laurie Foos' gently surreal new novel is set in a small lakeside town where the local mothers bake their secret confessions into moon pies, which they feed to a silent, mysterious blue-skinned girl.