There is probably no rhetorical device more favored by literary critics in the past decade than forecasting the death or rebirth of the contemporary novel. Among the form’s devotees there is often a ...

Mathias Énard, trans. from the French by Charlotte Mandell, Open Letter (Univ. of Nebraska, dist.), $16.95 trade paper (517p) ISBN 978-1-934824-26-9 Homeric in its scope and grandeur, remarkable in ...

Set between the 16th and 22nd centuries, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is a work of political comedy, fixated on class, climate, food, wine, and the afterlife. Set between the 16th and ...

Mathias Enard’s first novel published in English, “Zone” (2010), takes the form of a 500-page-long sentence, the internal monologue of a French Croatian spy on a train to the Vatican to sell a trove ...

Imagine if you told someone you were going to write an entire book -- 150,000 words -- that would be one single sentence. That’s what Mathias Énard did in “Zone,” which, despite its avant-garde form, ...

Compass. By Mathias Enard. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New Directions; 464 pages $26.95. Fitzcarraldo Editions; £14.99. “THE East is a career,” wrote Disraeli in his novel “Tancred”. Lately, the ...