Alexander Kluge's work has long grappled with the Third Reich and its aftermath, and the extermination of the Jews forms its gravitational center. Kluge is forever reminding us to keep our present catastrophes in perspective – "calibrated" – against...

Cairo 1925, Haret al-Yahud, the old Jewish Quarter. Esther, a beautiful young woman believed to be possessed by demons, longs to give birth after seven blissful years of marriage. Her husband, blind since childhood, does not object when, in her effor...

The latest work from Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano, "Invisible Ink" is a spellbinding tale of memory and its illusions. Private detective Jean Eyben receives an assignment to locate a missing woman, the mysterious Noelle Lefebvre. While the case pro...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! "Smoke from nearby factories shrouds a countryside as flat as a table, a countryside stretching off to infinity. Covering it are the ashes of millions of dead. Scattered throughout are fin...

The world's most powerful man, Qianlong, emperor of China, invites the famous eighteenth-century clockmaker Alister Cox to his court in Beijing. There, in the heart of the Forbidden City, the Englishman and his assistants are to build machines that m...

The year is 1938. The great Russian poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam is forty-seven years old and is dying in a transit camp near Vladivostok after having been arrested by Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into exile wi...

The Federmanns live a pleasant but painfully normal life in the Munich suburbs. All that the three children really know about money is that there's never enough of it in their family.   Every so often, their impish Great-Aunt Fe descends on the city....

Marked by powerful and evocative prose, Ferenc Barnas's novel tells the fascinating story of a young man's journey through his strange obsessions towards possible recovery. The unnamed narrator is the parasite, feeding off others' ailments, but he is...

In Japan there is a legend that anyone who folds one thousand paper cranes will have their wishes realized. But folding cranes, and the meditative, solemn care that it involves, has come to mean more than just an exercise in wish making. Origami cran...

We defy augury. There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, "this not to come... the readiness is all. Under the sign of Hamlet's last act, Helene Cixous, in her eightieth year, launched her new book – and the latest chapter...