The story, according to legend, goes like this: In 1502, Sultan Bayezid II, ruler of the Ottoman Empire, summons Leonardo da Vinci to construct a bridge that would span the Golden Horn, an inlet ...

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 ...

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 ...

Mathias Énard, trans. from the French by Charlotte Mandell. New Directions, $16.95 trade paper (192p) ISBN 978-0-8112-3901-1 This brilliant interlocking diptych from Énard (Compass) begins with ...

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 ...

Find Your Next Book Thrillers N.Y.C. Literary Guide Nonfiction Summer Preview Advertisement Supported by Fiction In “The Deserters,” Mathias Énard weaves the story of a lone soldier with that ...

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 ...

The French novelist Mathias Énard is an unusual kind of regionalist. His great subject isn’t a small town or neighborhood but the vast Mediterranean basin, and practically everyone within it.