Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda
I have just begun reading Elizabeth Taylor’s At Mrs Lippincote’s (not, it feels obligatory to point out, not that Elizabeth Taylor. From Valerie Martin‘s introduction: Though I never met either…
‘She is a woman palpably meant for happiness (if only purely physical happiness, mere bodily well-being) and yet so casually, it seems, she has chosen solitude, loyalty to an absent…
While Makine is Russian-born (writing in French) and Szalay is Canadian-born, these two works have much in common. Short, but genuinely epic in scope, showing how individual lives were shaped by…
Séamus Sweeney 