After winning the Nobel Prize for her searing portraits of the Soviet world unraveling, Svetlana Alexievich worries about the revival of its violent, anti-democratic ways.
Her life and work were shaped by confronting injustice in South Africa and Germany. “Blacks under apartheid — Jews under the swastika. Was it all that different?” she asked.
After winning the Nobel Prize for her searing portraits of the Soviet world unraveling, Svetlana Alexievich worries about the revival of its violent, anti-democratic ways.
The devil, Prada-clad or not, stays on the periphery of Caroline Palmer’s “Workhorse,” a novel about an ambitious assistant at a Vogue-like publication.
In “Splendid Liberators,” Joe Jackson presents the U.S. wars in Cuba and the Philippines as part of a misguided project to spread freedom across the world.
“Minor Black Figures” encompasses race, class, religion and art, but at its heart it’s really about “what happens when you encounter a priest at a bar one hazy summer night in New York.”