Pablo Strauss

Mikhail Iossel’s Sentence is the perfect book to read on public transit. These stories both capture and reinforce the way thoughts drift and memories flood in as you watch the world go by. Each of the collection’s thirty-eight pieces is a single sentence, ranging from twenty words to twenty-five pages. The first and longest…

Around the turn of the millennium, I picked up an old copy of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. First published in the late eighteenth century, the six-volume history had been ruthlessly abridged to 704 pages. A softcover octavo, my Viking Press edition from 1969 is flotsam of a postwar wave: the “Great Books” were printed by the…

Paul Auster likens translation to shovelling coal. I think of it as more like laying bricks. With one small move at a time, you build a wall to bear a load of meaning. Oh, and it should somehow be exactly like another wall made from different materials for another climate by someone whose mental image of a wall is nothing like your…