Set in Czechoslovakia between the 1940s and the 1990s, Tomas Zmeskal's stimulating novel focuses on one family's tragic story of love and the unspoken. Josef meets his wife, Kveta, before the Second World War at a public lecture on Hittite culture. K...

"We're living in a sensitive age, Cuke, and I'm not altogether sure you're fully attuned to it". So says Irish-American politician Frank Skeffington – a cynical, corrupt 1950s mayor, and also an old-school gentleman who looks after the constituents o...

One hundred years after Austrian satirist Karl Kraus began writing his dramatic masterpiece, "The Last Days of Mankind" remains as powerfully relevant as the day it was first published. Kraus's play enacts the tragic trajectory of the First World War...

Could a tiny mouse actually help the king of the jungle? That's what a trapped mouse promises to do if his lion captor sets him free. The lion laughs-and lets him go. But when hunters trap the scared and desperate lion, the mouse proves that even the...

Emotionally compelling and formally innovative, "Life-Like" is Toby Litt's most ambitious collection of short stories to date, bringing to fruition themes first aired in his previous books, "Adventures in Capitalism", "Exhibitionism", and "I Play the...

Snorri Sturluson was an Icelandic politician, writer, and historian living during the twelfth century. He was a man of great political influence, and his writings are still researched and valued today. Snorri was killed on September 22, 1241, in Reyk...

In Can Xue's extraordinary book, we encounter a full assemblage of husbands, wives and lovers. Entwined in complicated, often tortuous relationships, these characters step into each other's fantasies, carrying on conversations that are "forever guess...

Set in the darkest years of the Pinochet dictatorship, "La Vida Doble" is the story of Lorena, a leftist militant who arrives at a merciless turning point when every choice she confronts is impossible. Captured by agents of the Chilean repression, wi...

Set in New York City in the months preceding 9/11, Norman Manea's novel introduces us to the protagonist who, like the author himself, is a Romanian professor in exile and who struggles with loneliness, dislocation, the desire to hide. Yet his diffic...

This collection of masterful stories by Washington Irving includes the classic The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the eerie Rip Van Winkle, the funny The Specter Bridegroom, and the spooky The Devil and Tom Walker. These four stories create a strange and m...