The Margellos World Republic of Letters

From Editors Speak: A revered essayist, translator, historian, journalist, critic and storyteller, a writer chronically short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Adonis might conduct himself with all the austerity and distance his formidable reputation would allow....Adonis: Selected Poems is the first comprehensive survey of Adonis’ first six decades of work, allowing English readers to reckon with the arc of a remarkable literary career. Steeped in the lyrical and Surrealist traditions of European poetry, his essays and poetry have exerted an influence on Arabic literature comparable in English only to that of T. S. Eliot if not Walt Whitman.

One of the Seminary Co-op's 20 Best of the Year Selections: Hocus Bogus is a triumph in so many ways: here misdirection overcomes clarity; author trumps reader, and, in this volume, translator outs author. In his introduction, translator (and Man Booker International Prize-winner), David Bellos explores the peculiar contradictions of a work of nonfiction that is clearly false, but completely true. Given all of that, the spine of this slim work of grotesque absurdity tells the story too sparely and too quickly: "Romain Gary writing as Emile Ajar" According to Bellos, it was only as Ajar that Gary was free enough to write as he always wanted to, and to graduate from a literary humanism to the desolation and savory bile of a good modernist novel. If you're a fan of Samuel Beckett and Philip Roth, or if you're listening for a harsh scream from an unexpected quarter, this is the book.

From Public Radio International's The World The new translation by Margaret Sayers Peden serves up the freshness and naughtiness of the text while inviting a new generation of readers into the rich melodrama of a book that, although it is a classic, draws readers in not “because it is good for them,” but rather because it is fun.... “Celestina” is a work of literature that has all the sex, drama, and violence necessary for an HBO mini-series.