The Haitian artist and writer known as Frankétienne, who published the first novel written entirely in Haitian Creole and who, as the nation’s foremost literary lion, refracted its chaos and disorder through art, died on Thursday at his home in Port-au-Prince, the nation’s capital. He was 88. The Haitian Culture Ministry announced the death. The…
The majority of the books nominated for this year’s International Booker Prize, the prestigious award for fiction translated into English, are under 200 pages long. Only one is over 300 pages: Mircea Cartarescu’s 627-page “Solenoid,” translated by Sean Cotter. It is also one of the most high-profile novels on the list. Many literary critics have…
Maria Teresa Horta, a Portuguese feminist writer who helped shatter her conservative country’s strictures on women, died on Feb. 4 at her home in Lisbon. She was 87. Her death was announced on Facebook by her publisher, Dom Quixote. The Portuguese prime minister, Luis Montenegro, paid tribute to her on X, calling her “an important…
In Han Kang’s latest novel, a character saws off the tips of two of her fingers in a woodworking accident. Surgeons reattach them but the treatment is gruesome and agonizing. Every three minutes, for weeks on end, a caregiver carefully, dispassionately sinks needles deep into the sutures on each finger, drawing blood, to prevent the…