Rather than add to the massive canon of the victimized, for example, "My Slave" takes the perspective of the victimizer. In "The Open Curtain," a man achieves intimacy with his family only when he recognizes -- watching them dine as he sits in his car at the curb -- that he lives in a household of strangers. Menaced by a gang of skinheads in a Jewish cemetery, an American tourist in Germany placates the Neo-Nazis with a formula he continues to repeat even after he is safely back home in "I Am Not a Jew." And as for love, it makes demands in such stories as "Do Me" that shake our very notions of what it means to love.
If these stories engage the world in sometimes shocking ways, they are virtuoso engagements, eloquent in their prose, surprising in their plotting, sly in their humor. Biguenet shifts among voices and narrative strategies and imposes neither a single style nor a repeated structure as he depicts the ecological catastrophe of "A Plague of Toads," the problem posed by a ghost in the nursery in "Fatherhood," and the ghastly discovery a grieving widower defends as "another kind of memory" in "Rose."
Such mastery of craft may come as a surprise in a first-time author, but even more impressive is the object of his art. For whether it seeks to prick or to tickle, each story in The Torturer's Apprentice addresses its subject with an authority unusual in contemporary literature as it entices the reader beyond the boundaries of the expected and the accepted.
]]>Set on the Louisiana coast in 1957, Oyster recounts the engrossing tale of a deadly rivalry between two families. To avoid ruin after years of declining oyster crops, Felix and Mathilde Petitjean offer their young daughter, Therese, in marriage to 52-year-old Horse Bruneau, who holds the papers on their boat and house. Bruneau has spent his life as Felix's rival for both the Petitjeans' century-old oyster beds and, as we learn, Mathilde. But as Therese explains to Horse one night as they float in a pirogue alone in the marsh, "I don't get bought for the price of no damn boat."
The spiraling violence of Oyster and the seething passions behind it drive an unpredictable tale of murder and revenge in which two women and the men who desire them play out a drama as elemental and inexorable as a Greek tragedy.
]]>Featuring a special focus on Turkish poetry and a preview of Edith Grossman's latest work, Strange Harbors ferries poetry and fiction from eighteen languages and twenty-three countries to English readers. Highlights include: a crime story that unravels in Franco's Spain involving a student on the run from police, the attic of a country estate, and a lost masterpiece by an obscure poet; a Catalonian twist on painter Edward Hopper's noir Americana; poems by a man who barely escaped the political terror in El Salvador that deprived him of home and family; a Romanian story about a bizarre contest at a communist beach resort where the top prize is a paddleboat ride in the Black Sea with a teen beauty queen; and a story about the devastating legacy of Agent Orange on the people and culture of Vietnam. Placed in context by the translators themselves, each selection in Strange Harbors features commentary on the singular challenges and discomfiting pleasures of mediating the shift from language to language. For fifteen years Two Lines has served as a unique portal into the translator's art by collecting a vivid cross-section of global voices and presenting them in an annual anthology of world writing.
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