A pervasive assumption about the culture of the southern United States is that it is firmly rooted in an oral tradition, not a written one. Schweiger complicates our understanding of literacy and reading in the American South before emancipation by s...

Paul Celan (1920-1970) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is recognized as one of pos...

Fur Coats in Tahiti is a cocktail of borrowed forms and modes from Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, the OuLiPo, the Vienna Group, and the New York school. Jeremy Over mixes collage, doodles, erasures, findings, and mistranslations to create unlikely meeting...

"City of Departures" is Helen Tookey's second Carcanet collection, following her 2014 "Missel-Child", an 'exceptional volume... from a powerful and intelligent imagination' (Jeffrey Wainwright). "City of Departures" is a collection of uncanny spaces...

Widely praised in the Arab world, renowned author Sinan Antoon's fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his Ph.D. at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion...

For nearly half a century, German artist Max Neumann has worked to create, hone, and elaborate a visual vocabulary that is dark, compulsive, and forceful. A lifelong collaborator, Neumann's paintings have accompanied the work of Cees Nooteboom, Seamu...

Science has given us several explanations for how humans evolved from walking on four limbs to two feet. None, however, is as riveting as what master storyteller Ngugi wa Thiong'o offers in "The Upright Revolution". Blending myth and folklore with an...

The ruler of a totalitarian state seeks validation from a former schoolmate, now the nation's foremost thinker, in order to access a cultural cache alien to his regime. A literary critic provides commentary on an unfinished poem that both foretells...

Rage and obstinacy are close relatives – and fundamental categories in the work of both Georg Baselitz and Alexander Kluge. In "World-Changing Rage", these two accomplished German creators explore links and fractures between two cultures through two...

A Map Towards Fluency, Lisa Kelly's first collection, considers words, the power they impart, the power their absence withholds. Forgetting, mis-hearing, mis-remembering all challenge the imagination to find ways round and ways through. `The idea of...