Initially conceived of as a literary correspondence between them, authors George Ovitt and Peter Nash set out to chronicle their reading experiences in a series of short essays about the literature they love. Ultimately, in just over five years, they wrote more than 350 such essays, their favorite of which they've assembled in this collection under the title, Trotsky's Sink: Ninety-Eight Short Essays About Literature.
The essays included here provide the avid reader a glimpse of the life and work of authors as varied and compelling as Antonio Tabucchi, Natsume Soseki, François Cheng, Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan, Karen Russel, Jean-Euphèle Milcé, Zeruya Shalev, Mario Benedetti, Fernando Del Paso, Maria Dermoût, Sadegh Hedayat, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Diann Blakely, Caesare Pavese, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Christina Stead, Leonid Tsypkin, Oz Shelach, Nihad Sirees, Scholastique Mukasonga, Heather Rose, David Albahari, Dulce María Loynaz, Antonio Munoz Molina, Tsitsi Dangarembga, David Rhodes, and Lafcadio Hearn.
Treating these and other, generally less-known writers from around the world, the essays are charged, often urgent reflections on literature and politics, on history and culture, on love and longing and death.