world literature

Book Reviews

• James R. Brandon: On Thrones of Gold*
  Three Javanese Shadow Plays
• Stephanie Dalley: Myths from Mesopotamia
  Creation, The Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others
• Unai Elorriaga: Plants Don't Drink Coffee*
  - intertwined stories about insects, rugby, love + carpentry
• John L. Foster: Love Songs of the New Kingdom*
  - ancient Egyptian love poems
• Georgi Gospodinov: Natural Novel
  - a comedy in fragments
• Hamid Ismailov: Manaschi*
  - a Kyrgyz story, modern and traditional
• Ismail Kadare: The Concert
  - a comedy of communist manners; the end of the Albania-China alliance
• Ismail Kadare: The General of the Dead Army*
  - on a macabre quest in Albania
• Ismail Kadare: The Palace of Dreams*
  - an Ottoman bureaucracy managing dreams
• Ismail Kadare: The Pyramid
  - a parable of life under communism
• Ismail Kadare: Spring Flowers, Spring Frost
  - a mythological comedy in post-communist Albania
• Jaan Kross: The Conspiracy and Other Stories
  - Estonia in the Second World War
• Jaan Kross: Professor Martens' Departure*
• Jaan Kross: The Czar's Madman
  - von Bock is a friend of Tsar Alexander I, but also an idealist...
• V.S. Naipaul: In a Free State
  - stories about individuals in foreign countries, coping with alien cultures
• Manuel Rivas: In the Wilderness
  - magic and the mundane in a Galician village

See also: ethnographic fiction | fiction | historical fiction | medieval literature

This category only includes works of fiction. There is a separate foreign language page that lists all works reviewed in translation, by the original language. For books about or set in particular countries, see the country/region index.