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Kevin Rabalais

Kevin Rabalais is the author of The Landscape of Desire.

Articles by this author

Image of Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan’s dynamic new novel, ‘Manhattan Beach’, will reward all readers
Small moments
From the first few sentences of Jennifer Egan’s new novel, Manhattan Beach (Corsair; $32.99), the reader sinks into the comfort of entering a world complete, one under the...
 
Rachel Seiffert’s ‘A Boy in Winter’ chronicles the physical and psychological brutality of war from multiple perspectives
Three grey days
Rachel Seiffert, the Booker Prize–shortlisted author of The Dark Room, coaxes mixed emotions from the reader on nearly every page of her latest work. There is, first of all, a...
 
An irresistible collection of columns from a master storyteller
‘The Dog’s Last Walk’ by Howard Jacobson
You would have no trouble picking Howard Jacobson’s sentences out of a line-up. They jab. From one to the next, they provoke a flurry of emotions. Read Jacobson to laugh. Read him...
 
Cover of Lincoln in the Bardo
Bloomsbury; $29.99
‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ by George Saunders
In his long-awaited debut novel, George Saunders – author of four highly praised short-story collections, among them CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and Tenth of December –...
 
Cover of Transit
Jonathan Cape; $32.99
‘Transit’ by Rachel Cusk
A novel, to paraphrase Stendhal, is a mirror travelling down a road. In Outline (2015) and Transit – the first two published volumes of a proposed trilogy – Canadian-born, UK-...
 
Cover of A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women
Sceptre; $32.99
‘A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women’ by Siri Hustvedt
In novels such as What I Loved and The Blazing World and the memoir The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, Siri Hustvedt initiates deep philosophical and psychological...
 
Jonathan Cape; $32.99
‘Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights’ by Salman Rushdie
Think about Salman Rushdie and try not to conjure the word “fatwa”. The death sentence Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced on 14 February 1989 – his “unfunny valentine”, as...
 
Faber & Faber; $29.99
‘The Discreet Hero’ by Mario Vargas Llosa
Georges Simenon always said that he approached his romans durs, or hard novels, more seriously than his books featuring the detective Maigret. Graham Greene categorised his...
 
Bloomsbury; $29.99
‘Let Me Be Frank with You’ by Richard Ford
He introduced himself in one of the most memorable and direct voices of contemporary American fiction: “My name is Frank Bascombe. I am a sportswriter.” Readers first met Bascombe...
 
The young Dylan Thomas
A century of Dylan Thomas
Majesty and burning
It sounded like a hoax. In June, more than half a century after the poet died following yet another marathon binge, the Guardian reported the discovery of a drinking song “dashed...
 
Random House; $35
‘Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage’ by Haruki Murakami (trans. Philip Gabriel)
His name carries a cultural cachet rarely granted writers today, much less those of the literary variety. As a brand, Haruki Murakami infiltrated the West with the English...
 
New York Review Books; $29.99
‘Agostino’ by Alberto Moravia
For much of the 20th century, Alberto Moravia’s name was a byword for sexy sophistication. Moravia titillated readers with his highly charged sexual and psychological tales, among...
 
Scribe; $29.99
Edgard Telles Ribeiro’s ‘His Own Man’
It’s no surprise, given the region’s turbulent history, that the boom in Latin American literature during the 1960s and ’70s included the “dictator novel” subgenre. During the era...
 
Trans. Christopher Moncrieff; Alma Classics; $19.99
Robert Musil’s ‘The Confusions of Young Master Törless’
In the quartet of great 20th-century modernist writers that includes James Joyce, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, Robert Musil remains the most enigmatic member. That he failed to...
 
Jonathan Cape; $79.95
Jane Rogoyska’s ‘Gerda Taro: Inventing Robert Capa’
From the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War came rumours of a photographer in high heels who paraded her beauty for the morale of Loyalist soldiers. No such images survive, but...
 
Hemingway’s passport, 1923. © John F Kennedy Library, Boston
A portrait of Papa as a young man
‘The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Vol. 2: 1923–1925’
In 1924, the year before he wrote The Sun Also Rises and defined the sensibilities of a generation deemed lost, Ernest Hemingway was gored in a Pamplona bullring. Or at least that...
 
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