Mia Couto Rain and Other Stories Trans. Eric M. B. Becker Biblioasis Winner of the Camões Prize in 2013 and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014, world-renowned Mozambican author Mia Couto strings together a collection of stories playing upon the uncertain future of war-torn Mozambique. With a focus on the rebirth of his country, Couto writes from the perspectives of various characters and frames the stories through the lens of magical realism. Saskia de Coster We and Me Trans. Nancy Forest-Flier World Editions Belgian author Saskia de Coster’s spellbinding novel lends a distinctly European perspective to the Great American Novel, painting a compellingly haunting portrait of life’s most important questions in the context of bourgeoisie family life. Alternating perspectives lend the narrative a sense of captivating momentum, and de Coster’s skillful excavation of nuanced emotions add depth and resonance. We and Me won de Coster her third Cutting Edge Award. Nota Bene Regaining the openness, suppleness, and wonder of a child’s mind is a common theme throughout mystic literature, from Christian monks to Zen masters, Sufi teachers to Taoist sages. Dedicating a good portion of the book to such ideas, Lababidi certainly shows that his mysticism runs far deeper than any tweet. How to properly read a collection like Where Epics Fail is a bit of a task in itself. On one hand, simply reading the book cover to cover allows you to see Lababidi develop his thoughts on various topics, almost as if you were reading his journal. This method provides some interesting perspective, but it can also leave you feeling a bit disjointed, as each self-contained thought begins to pile up into an unwieldy whole. On the other hand, Where Epics Fail is exactly the kind of book that could be picked up each morning and opened at random to provide the reader with a meditation for the day. While Lababidi covers a wide range of topics , he also provides many subtle variations and different perspectives on the same subject . The insights that one aphorism might uncover could be completely deflated in the one that follows. Reading the book slowly and deliberately, holding each aphorism in mind, and remaining open to Lababidi’s shifting perspectives could indeed make Where Epics Fail a new mystic manual for our hectic lives. Z. McGrew University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma Roberto Calasso The Unnamable Present Trans. Richard Dixon. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2019. 208 pages. This book deals with the twenty-first century , the historical experience it accommodates in terms of terrorism, tourism, and information technology, and how these experiences emerge from its genocidal “there is in our lives a televisual remove that one is afforded as a consumer of everything, a spectator of everything. The great spectator of the world. Nothing happens here”—the clerk intervenes. “The [author] admits culpability. This is not enough for the clerk [who] knows that admitting guilt is a cop-out.” At times brilliant and also opaque, The Blue Clerk is a major achievement that challenges us to reflect on writing as an unsettled and unsettling form of engagement with experience and meaning . When the clerk refers to a sense of “emergency” the author felt as a child, the author remarks, “I wasn’t writing then . . . But I was collecting, says the clerk.” As the clerk describes sensations from the author’s life before she was a writer—“I have here the sense of orange, the sense of distances, then a sound of a window falling shut”—the author, perhaps like the reader sometimes overwhelmed by the weight of words, says, simply, “Stop.” This is good advice for readers of The Blue Clerk, who will be rewarded if they occasionally pause, take time to reflect, and reread this rich and enriching book. Jim Hannan Le Moyne College WORLDLIT.ORG 89 predecessor. Crucially, Roberto Calasso takes to task the contradictions between the high culture of analogy, which elsewhere he has connected to the imperative “to interpret infinitely, without a primum and without an end,” with, on one hand, a messianic drive to enact the analogy irrevocably and, on the other hand, a...