{"id":13755,"date":"2018-07-01T00:05:13","date_gmt":"2018-07-01T05:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.lib.luc.edu\/locl\/?p=13755"},"modified":"2026-01-12T15:36:18","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T21:36:18","slug":"world-cup-of-books-july-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/noteworthy\/2018\/07\/01\/world-cup-of-books-july-1\/","title":{"rendered":"World Cup of Books: July 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

This summer, the Loyola Libraries are excited to bring you the World Cup of Books<\/strong>, an interactive program to encourage reading books from other countries. Show your support for your favorite team by reading books from and about their country!
\nToday\u2019s round of 16 match-ups include Spain v Russia and Croatia v Denmark<\/p>\n

Spain: \"\"
\nValley of the Fallen by Carlos Rojas, translated by Edith Grossman<\/strong><\/p>\n

Spanish novelist and art historian Rojas delivers a politically charged, time-shifting portrait of the painter Francisco Goya in a time of repression. Goya painted his subjects as he saw them, to sometimes precarious result, as when he turned in a portrait of the royal family that \u201clay bare in their features the stupidity, ambition, and duplicitous cunning that dwell within them.\u201d For all that Goya was nearly indigent, deaf, and suffering from \u201cthe syphilis that perhaps he hadn\u2019t known until then he had contracted in his early youth,\u201d he was also exquisitely attuned to questions of political survival\u2014a useful skill given that his b\u00eate noire if also odd confidant, the king, proudly describes himself as \u201cyour Saturn, devouring my people.\u201d Leapfrogging decades, the scene shifts to another Saturn, the dying Francisco Franco, and the time of an art historian and intellectual, Sandro Vasari, \u201ca descendant of Giorgio Vasari and three generations of \u00e9migr\u00e9s terroni.\u201d He is discontented, a hard drinker in a turbulent relationship, but finds meaning in the work of Goya, whose biography he is struggling to write and who was there at the dawn of \u201cthe liberal tradition that filled almost a century and a half of history, in spite of so many armed interruptions and its own errors, falsehoods, political bosses, and limitations of every kind\u201d\u2014and that Franco, his heart steadily failing, tried to end for so long. A complex but rewarding meditation on the monstrous dreams of reason. \u2013Kirkus Review<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Request it here,<\/a><\/strong> or grab it from the IC Display <\/p>\n

Russia: \"\"
\nFound Life: Poems, Stories, Comics, a Play, & an Interview by Linor Goralik, edited by Ainsley Morse, Maria Vassileva, & Maya Vinokou<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the first Russian writers to make a name for herself on the Internet, Linor Goralik writes conversational short works that conjure the absurd in all its forms, reflecting post-Soviet life and daily universals. Her mastery of the minimal, including a wide range of experiments in different forms of micro-prose, is on full display in this collection of poems, stories, comics, a play, and an interview, here translated for the first time. In Found Life, speech, condensed to the extreme, captures a vivid picture of fleeting interactions in a quickly moving world.Goralik is a keen observer of the female condition, recounting gendered tribulations with awareness and amusement. From spiritual rabbits and biblical zoos to poems about loss and comics about poetry, Goralik’s colorful language and pervasive dark comedy capture the heights of ridiculousness and the depths of grief. -Amazon <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Request it here,<\/a><\/strong> or grab it from the Cudahy Main Stacks <\/p>\n

Croatia: \"\"
\nThe Return of Philip Latinowicz by Miroslav Krleza, translated by Zora Depolo<\/strong><\/p>\n

Philip Latinowicz is a successful but disillusioned painter who returns to his hometown after an absence of twenty-three years. He hopes that revisiting his roots will inspire him to create the perfect work of art and thereby restore his faith in both art and life. Haunted by his troubled childhood, however, he falls in with shady characters and discovers the emotional, intellectual, and imaginative poverty of his own background. \u2013Northwestern Press<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Request it here,<\/a><\/strong> or grab it from the Lewis Display <\/p>\n

Denmark: \"\"
\nIf I were a suicide bomber: & other verses by Per Aage Brandt, translated by Thom Satterlee<\/strong> <\/p>\n

The compactness of these poems gives them an epigrammatic quality, but reading a number of them in succession puts one more in mind of Montaigne than of Martial. That is, the poems read like very tight verse essays, or assays. They try out and try on various ideas and perspectives. Often they express a strong but frustrated desire for transcendent meaning, as when, early in the volume, Brandt writes, \u201cthe morning light seems to want to speak\u201d or, later and a bit more idiosyncratically, \u201cthe cat jumps up onto my computer \/ and vomits, that has to mean something[.]\u201d Toward the end of the volume, he describes rain that sounds \u201cas if the sea-dark truth was music\u2019s \/ deeper meaning, which we still don\u2019t believe[.]\u201d Elsewhere in the book, Brandt turns this quest for a meaning always denied into a dialogue with the great Danish philosopher S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard. \u2013World Literature Today<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Request it here,<\/a><\/strong> or grab it from the IC Display <\/p>\n

Have you read any of these books, or a book from another country participating in the 2018 World Cup? Add a review of a book from a participating nation to our bracket here<\/a>! You can also fill out our quick form here<\/a>, and we’ll add your review to the bracket board. Your review may appear in a future blog post!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This summer, the Loyola Libraries are excited to bring you the World Cup of Books, an interactive program to encourage reading books from other countries. Show your support for your favorite team by reading books from and about their country! Today\u2019s round of 16 match-ups include Spain v Russia and Croatia v Denmark Spain: Valley […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes"},"categories":[1],"tags":[571,8926,10331,10332],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/noteworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13755"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/noteworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/noteworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/noteworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/noteworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13755"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/noteworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17616,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/noteworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13755\/revisions\/17616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/noteworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/noteworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/noteworthy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}