I read, and read obsessively, in search of transformation, of following any author’s eyes to a new angle on the world–for me, that’s entertainment. One author who does this consistently is Ismail Kadare, the Albanian novelist who won the 2005 Man Booker International Prize and is year after year shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in […]

Recently my Portuguese pal Paulo Dias Figueiredo introduced me to the work of Ruy Belo, a poet who Paulo claims is second only in 20th century Portuguese stature to the poet Fernando Pessoa (and I realize that I haven’t yet posted anything about Pessoa–I will soon). After reading a clutch of poems by Belo, translated […]