On Not Facing the Death of a Civilization

A conversation with translator Will Stone about Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig.On 23 February 1942 Stefan Zweig, the Austrian playwright, journalist, novelist, and cultural patron, committed suicide with his wife Lotte in the bedroom of a rented house in Petrópolis,...

When Time Was Measured in Decades

Viejas historias de Castilla la Vieja (Old Stories of Old Castile) is a short novel about Old Castile, the historic region and birthplace of Spanish author Miguel Delibes (1920-2010). The novel was published in 1964. Castilians revere their language, which they refer...

Endo and the Challenge of Orthodoxy

Silence: A Novel by Shūsaku Endō, translated by William Johnston. Picador Modern Classics, 2016. Paperback, 212+xxvi pages, $16. When he was a boy, Japanese author Shūsaku Endō (1923–1996) converted to Roman Catholicism. He attended Tokyo’s Keio University after the...

Taking Things as They Are

Mr. Blue by Myles Connolly with an introduction by Stephen Mirarchi. Cluny Media, 2015. Paper, 198+xiv pages, $18. This new edition of Myles Connolly’s 1928 Catholic novella Mr. Blue invites comment on the state of relations between Roman Catholicism and American...

The Dread Beneath

The War of the Worlds: From H. G. Wells to Orson Welles to Jeff Wayne, Steven Spielberg and Beyond by Peter J. Beck. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Paper, 408 pages, $30. No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being...