Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is a remarkable book. Originally published in 1972 in Italian as Le città invisibili, this is an unusual piece of literary work. It reads like a series of vignettes where imaginary dialogues between Marco Polo and the all-powerful Kublai Khan are interspersed with evocative descriptions of cities that the former…
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Are we what we look like? This is the question put forth by Sophie Lewis in the translator’s afterword of Beautiful Image by Marcel Aymé. First published as La Belle Image in 1941, this novel was translated by Lewis into English and published by Pushkin Press in 2008. The story starts off in a French administrative office, where…
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What if you could be someone else yet retain your memory and thoughts? I recently bought a secondhand copy of Hanif Kureishi’s The Body at Nijinski. The eponymous novella, which kicks off this collection of short stories, revolves around Adam, a successful playwright in his 60s who has seen better days. Like most people of his age, he sees and feels the…
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Published in 1961, The Winter of Our Discontent was John Steinbeck‘s last novel. I came across this 1975 copy at Nijinski, my favourite secondhand bookstore in Brussels. I had not read Steinbeck previously but the title caught my eye. The cheesy book cover – of a man, standing in front of a dramatic painting of a…
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