Nawal el Saadawi is a feminist, novelist, poet, playwright, political activist, doctor, teacher, mother, daughter. She has a formidable intellect, is courageous, forthright and controversial. This reader brings together el Saadawi's writing from the past thirty years
READ MORE

Lena Meydan's novel Twilight Forever Rising (originally titled Blood Brothers in Russian, perhaps changed in translation to capitalize on the Twilight phenomenon)—the first installment of a best-selling fantasy series in Russia—depicts a world in which humans unknowingly coexist with vampires who are the real forces behind politics, art, and war.
READ MORE

The interesting point about most of the stories in Karen Joy Fowler's superb new collection is what doesn't matter in them. Most feature some element of the fantastic, which typically would be their point. But here, the fantastic element or idea is always less interesting than Fowler's character or milieu.
READ MORE

Garden in the Wind, a collection of four short stories by Gabrielle Roy, is what I like to call "a quiet book." I use this term to describe books where all the action is under the surface …
READ MORE

Wow! Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is big news in Russia, but was little known in the English-speaking world before the publication of this collection by Penguin in 2009. I hope much more of her work is published in English, because, on the evidence of this collection, she is a stunningly good writer.
READ MORE