Books I love and recommend

Azar Nafisi

Reading Dangerously-The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times (Harper Collins 2003) is the latest work by Azar Nafisi, the best-selling author of Reading Lolita in Teheran. In a loving letter of gratitude to her father she remembers how he gave her the curiosity to visit works of literature that open the mind beyond country and language barriers.

Reading Dangerously is a book that “provokes and inspires at every turn… (Publisher’s Weekly.) (Harper Collins 2023). See the author’s reading at the Village Voice Bookshop in Paris in Village Voices. pp 226-228. (Seven Stories Press 2024).

Alice Kaplan

Seeing Baya is the unique story of a young Algerian artist who became a ‘sensation’ in the artistic Paris of the 1950’s, told beautifully by the American author Alice Kaplan. Baya’s colorful and mysterious paintings were exhibited in the most famous Parisian Gallery Maeght — the ‘home’ of such famous painters as Braque and Bonnard. Her dazzling talent was admired by le “tout Paris” while the war for independence was raging in Algeria, her home.

Alice Kaplan is also the author of The Collaborator (University of Chicago press 2000) and of Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis. (The University of Chicago Press 2012) See readings by the author in Village Voices (pp.95-98 and 336.)

Ellen Hinsey

Ellen Hinsey’s The Invisible Fugue – her personal homage to Beethoven and the poet Hölderlin, has inspired the philosopher Giorno Agamben to describe the author as “a mind that bears witness to an unprecedented ability to never abandon poetry, even when approaching the extreme limits of the black chaos of the unmanifest. The earth appears as if in the splendor of the first day, beyond all possible destruction.” ((Wildhouse Poetry, Boston Ma. 2024)

Ellen Hinsey is the author of numerous collections of poetry. (See her presentations in Village Voices (op.cit.) pp. 323-326. Her essay Mastering the Past, Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe and the Rise of Illiberalism was an early warning against attack on European democracies. (Telos Press 2017)

Jean Guehénno

Jean Guehénno: Diary of the Dark Years, 1940- 1944: Collaboration , Resistance and Daily life in Occupied Paris. Translated and annotated by David Ball.

This war diary written day after day some eighty years ago is a must-read book when the world is again going through major upheavals leading to unbearable human sufferings. His author, an eminent French author of the 20^th century, shares with us-distraught citizens of the twenty first century, his deep, relevant reflections as, powerless, he observes his society disintegrating under his eyes.