
From Atlantis, Carmen Portero Munoz (Cordoba): Noun-noun Euphemisms in the Language of the Global Financial Crisis. Paul Krugman on how Ben Bernanke has the power, and the obligation, to end the slump and the human misery that comes with it — so what’s stopping him? No end in sight: James Surowiecki on why long-term unemployment hurts us all. From the Russell Sage Foundation, a forum on social class in America. The purpose of spectacular wealth, according to a spectacularly wealthy guy: Edward
…Prolific Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes died at a hospital in Mexico City on Tuesday at the age of eighty-three. One of the most influential members of the Latin American Boom movement, Fuentes was the author of over thirty books, including The Death of Artemio Cruz, The Old Gringo, and The Crystal Frontier, as well as a political columnist and essayist. Though he was never granted a Nobel Prize, France did give him a National Order of Merit,
…
Ellen Ullman's latest novel, By Blood, tells the story of a psychologically unstable academic who while on a forced leave of absence in San Francisco discovers that he can hear a young woman's therapy sessions through the walls of his office, The professor gradually becomes obsessed with the patient, going so far as to surreptitiously help her uncover disturbing truths about her family history, All of this unfolds against the backdrop of 1970s San Francisco, a world that Ullman depicts through her narrator's troubled mind as an urban nightmare.
…






Italian novelist Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa in 1943 and died in Portugal last weekend at the age of 68. Tabucchi was the author of more than two dozen novels, including 1994's "Pereira Declares," and 1997's "The Missing Head of Damascenio Monteiro," a crime novel about the discovery of a headless man. Below is an excerpt from the beginning of "The Missing Head," courtesy of New Directions.
…