Juan Vidal
-
Alejandro Jodorowsky's hallucinatory new novel follows two women on the run — one suffering from a monstrous affliction. Though disturbing in places, it has the feel of an ancient fireside tale.
-
Returning to a book you've read before can feel like getting a drink with an old friend. But even though the book's the same, you yourself may have changed — and that's what makes rereading so rich.
-
The bard of America's Jazz Age died 75 years ago today, but his work is as popular as ever. Critic Juan Vidal remembers discovering Fitzgerald's work in a dusty secondhand bookshop.
-
Michael Bible's slim new novel follows a jaded, drunken priest and his chess-master sidekick on a cross country journey, along with a crowd of misfits and outliers who help give the book its charm.
-
Critic Juan Vidal says Kafka's classic tale of alienation — published 100 years ago this month — helped bring about a metamorphosis in his own life (though rather more positive than Gregor Samsa's).
-
Three novellas by some of Italy's best crime writers make up Judges. Andrea Camilleri, Carlo Lucarelli and Giancarlo De Cataldo weave tales of idealistic judges fighting crime and corruption.
-
Joseph Roth was an Austrian reporter whose writing provided a vivid portrait of pre-WWII Europe. Critic Juan Vidal says this newly translated collection of his work shows his intelligence and humor.
-
Readers everywhere are rediscovering the work of Brazil's Clarice Lispector. Critic Juan Vidal calls Lispector a singular artist, whose newly collected stories linger in the mind like poetry.
-
Laurie Foos' gently surreal new novel is set in a small lakeside town where the local mothers bake their secret confessions into moon pies, which they feed to a silent, mysterious blue-skinned girl.
-
Reviewer Juan Vidal has had the debut album by Texas soul crooner Leon Bridges on heavy rotation, and it's making him think of parallels with James Baldwin's first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain.