Reinhard Jirgl's strikingly individual novel The Fire Above, the Mountain Below demonstrates that he is not only unorthodox in his approach to language, but also difficult to pin down in terms of any genre. Weaving together elements of crime story, C...

"Last Kingdom is a set of books that... is neither philosophical argumentation nor little disparate, scholarly essays, nor novelistic narrative; gradually, for me, all genres have fallen away".   So writes Pascal Quignard of his monumental book serie...

Steeped in a long history of violence and suffering, Michael X. Wang's debut collection of short stories interrogates personal and political events set against the backdrop of China that are both real and perceived, imagined and speculative. Wang plu...

This personal book explores both the public and the private dimensions of forgetting and its scary Siamese twin, remembering. Forgetting takes in our modern fear of Alzheimer's and dementia; the abuse to which such slogans as "Remember Auschwitz!" c...

A mix of autobiography and lucid invention, this highly personal work offers a deeply affecting exploration of the meaning of identity and pedigree. With his signature blend of candor, mystery, and bewitching elusiveness, Patrick Modiano weaves toget...

From the writer of the delightful utopian fantasy "Sultana's Dream" come these witty tales describing the twists and turns of India's two-hundred-year relationship with the Imperial British. Available to contemporary English readers for the first tim...

Almost twenty years after the fall of the wall, the Kreuzberg district of Berlin has become unbearably trendy and deeply unappealing to Alina and Wolf. They move to Muggelsee, at the city's bucolic border, where the differences between East and West...

In a publishing world that is all too full of realist novels written in undistinguished prose, discernible only by their covers, "The Flying Mountain" stands out – if for no other reason than that it consists entirely of blank verse. And that form is...

In this novel from esteemed political writer Tariq Ali, a father, Vlady, loses his job when he refuses to renounce socialist beliefs in the newly unified Germany – and as a result wants to explain to his alienated son what their family's long and pas...

Very little is known about Aesop who was supposed to have been a slave on the island of Samos in the sixth century BC. It is his fables (and those attributed to him) that have come down to us through the centuries. In this version, a fabulist from...