Belletrista

This is an archived issue of Belletrista. If you are looking for the current issue, you can find it here


TRIO! Ceri Evans discusses three books by Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif.	"Seven Little Rooms" - original fiction by notable Hindi author Mridula Garg.	Who Has the Power? Reading Arab Women in English by M. Lynx Qualey

Welcome, readers, to our sixth issue! Besides our regular review section featuring an array of intriguing books, and the tantalizing previews of new books in our New & Notable section, we have provided you with a compelling mix of fascinating articles this issue. There is a thought-provoking piece on reading the work of Arab Women in translation, one of our "Trios" explores three books by Ahdaf Soueif, and we report back from the splashy Book Expo America. In this issue we are honored to introduce to our readers the eminent Indian author Mridula Garg with two pieces: the first is an original short story translated from the Hindi by the author herself, and a second piece by Sunita Jain on Ms. Garg's place in literature.

We hope you enjoy this wonderful issue and with it we complete our first year of celebrating literature written by women all over the world! Thank you for being a part of our reading community.

Reviews
Click on 'Reviews' to see the full list of this issue's reviews...

NEWS FROM HOME: SHORT STORIES

Sefi Atta

The Nigerian author Sefi Atta will be familiar to close readers of Belletrista, as her first novel, Everything Good Will Come, the winner of the 2006 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, was reviewed in issue 3. Her second book, News From Home, is a collection of 10 short stories and a novella that was awarded the 2009 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa.
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Reviewed by Darryl Morris

DON'T CRY

Mary Gaitskill

A recurrent comment about Mary Gaitskill's work is that she writes like a man. Powerful, relentless, and at times brutal, her stories take readers to an edge over which female writers apparently are not supposed to step.
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Reviewed by Deborah Montuori

THE WOMEN MY FATHER KNEW

Savyon Liebrecht

Trasnslated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston

At the age of seven, Meir left his father in Tel Aviv to join his mother in the United States. Straightaway he was told that his father had died. At that moment, all memories of his first seven years died, too.
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Reviewed by Kathleen Ambrogi

THURSDAY NIGHT WIDOWS

Claudia Piñeiro

Translated from the Portuguese by Miranda France

Claudia Piñeiro's Thursday Night Widows presents itself as a thriller. Yet even though in the opening we have three dead bodies in a pool and are promised an investigation of how they came to be there, this novel has more in common with Camus, or with DeLillo, than with a standard thriller. The bodies remain decaying…
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Reviewed by Andrew Stancek