When it comes to fiction writers you read, which countries are most of them from? Why do you focus on literature from those countries? And what are your favorite books from outside your geographic comfort zone?

Clearly, De Luca is indebted to the poetics of prose (if not to poetry) since there are no fewer than 50 instances in which he uses similes and an almost equal number of metaphors. It's apparent, too, that the use of such poetic devices are a kind of mainstay of his art.

The following conversation is drawn from an interview I did with David Foster Wallace in September 2006 as part of a series of articles and radio piec...

The Dostoevskaya station -- which opened this summer in memory of Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky -- met a fair share of opposition when psychologist...

Tolstoy is better appreciated in the West, academics claim, even though Western readers discovered classics such as War and Peace a good century after...

The best guide to the careers of Yanukovych, Yushchenko, and Tymoshenko is Nikolai Gogol, who brought the absurd to Russian literature. In his short s...

Tolstoy has been better served by translators than other Russian writers, but there is still the challenge of coming closer to the original, of catching more of its specific stylistic qualities than previous translations have done.