White Guard Mikhail Bulgakov, Yale University Press, 310 pages, $18 “Great was the year and terrible the Year of Our Lord 1918, the second since the Revolution had begun.” So opens White Guard, the new and utterly admirable translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s first novel, written some 83 years ago when the author was just 22. … Read more
This past winter, the illustrious and venerable New York publishing house Alfred A. Knopf published the third and final volume of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Its title is The Amber Spyglass, and it runs 518 handsomely laid-out pages. The English-born, Oxford-educated Pullman had earmarked his first two volumes for the “young adult” market, … Read more
Seventy years ago Norwegian novelist Sigrid Undset was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. At 46 she was one of the youngest authors and only the third woman to be so honored. As the decades have passed, it has become ever more evident that Undset’s talent as a novelist places her, along with George Eliot, … Read more