Babelguides: Ray Keenoy

Ray Keenoy

Works by Ray Keenoy

by Ray Keenoy

Watch out, there's a Hungarian about! As this lighthearted look at the phenomenon of famous Hungarians shows this is a small nation that has always punched well above its weight, playing a major role in innumerable fields, including; nuclear physics (Teller and Szilárd), (more...)

Babel Guide to Jewish Fiction (Babel Guides) [Buy Direct]

by Ray Keenoy and Saskia Brown and Mark Axelrod and European Jewish Publications Society

The Babel Guide to the Fiction of Portugal, Brazil & Africa in English Translation [Buy Direct]

by Ray Keenoy and Pat Odber and Tom Maccarthy and Maria-Manuela Lisboa and Maria-Amelia Dalsenter and Marina Coriolano-Lykourezos and Paul Hyland and David Treece and David Brookshaw and Carmo Ponte

Reviews by Ray Keenoy

Memoirs of Hadrian [Buy Direct]

by Marguerite Yourcenar
Translated by G. Frick
Original title: Memoires d’Hadrien

The imaginary memoirs of the man who built the famous wall, one of the last Roman Emperors considered to be a great man and a wise ruler. While the earlier Nine Coins in the Fountain is an exhilarating, brief panoply of mainly female characters, explored in rather a feminine way, (more...)

Barren Lives [Buy Direct]

by Graciliano Ramos
Translated by Ralph E. Dimmick
Original title: Vidas Secas

Dating back to 1938 this is one of the all-time great novels of rural existence in Brazil, telling of the life of a small migrant family (and their dog) in the harsh social and ecological conditions of the drought-plagued state of Alagoas. (more...)

Once Upon a Time in Lithuania [Buy Direct]

by Naomi Alexander

A lot of illustrated books are just a pastiche of recycled stock images with some quickly-jotted truisms and factoids mashed up to make the ‘accompanying copy’. Usually they quickly and deservedly reach their natural home on the tables of the remaindered book shop. (more...)

Bertolt Brecht Collected Short Stories [Buy Direct]

by Bertolt Brecht
Translated by A Tatlow
Original title: Kurzgeschichten 1921-1946

Deborah [Buy Direct]

by Esther Kreitman
Translated by Maurice Carr

Perhaps the greatest literary family ever, the Singers of Bilgoray Poland, counting Nobel-winner Isaac Bashevis, (more...)

Showdown [Buy Direct]

by Jorge Amado
Translated by Gregory Rabassa
Original title: Tocaia Grande

Showdown was described as giving ‘the underside of (Brazilian) history’ by B.J.Chamberlain in his 1990 book on Jorge Amado. It’s certainly the underside in the sense of being the totally non-respectable version of the founding of a cocoa town in Southern Bahia. (more...)

Garden of the Finzi-Continis [Buy Direct]

by Giorgio Bassani
Translated by I Quigley
Original title: Il giardino dei Finzi-Continis

This story is set in the fascist era of the 20s and 30s. The garden lies behind a villa in the prosperous Northern city of Ferrara and is the centre of the happy world of Alberto and Micòl, children of a wealthy Jewish family. (more...)

Sacred (2000) [Buy Direct]

by Éliette Abécassis
Translated by Karen Newby
Original title: La Répudiée

A book that is both a cri-de-coeur from and a celebration of the closed ultra-Orthodox world of Israel’s Hasidic population in Mea Shearim, Jerusalem.

Abécassis is a new (to English-speakers) Jewish writer from France making an appearance with a powerful, (more...)

The Pillar of Salt [Buy Direct]

by Albert Memmi
Translated by E Roditi
Original title: La Statue de sel

Memmi’s engrossing and startling book Pillar of Salt is roughly, the story of a young man growing up between Arab, Berber, Jewish and Franco-European traditions in Mid-century Tunis, (more...)

Moments of Reprieve [Buy Direct]

by Primo Levi
Translated by Ruth Feldman
Original title: Lilit e altri racconti (mostly)

Like the Drowned and the Saved and If This is a Man this is one of the series of books Primo Levi wrote about his and others’ experience of the German death camps. Levi strove, as all men and women with any social awareness must, (more...)

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