Anna Maria van Schurman was widely regarded as the most erudite woman in seventeenth-century Europe. As "the Star of Utrecht", she was active in a network of learning that included the most renowned scholars of her time. Known for her extensive learn...

Born to merchant-class parents who served in the court of Henry VIII and his queens, Anne Vaughan Lock lived in London and Exeter, spent time in Geneva as a religious exile, belonged to the Cooke sisters' political-religious circle, maintained friend...

In The Beforeland, a boy's desperate act of rebellion against his grandmother reverberates outward, causing rifts and reckonings in the lives of others: a man fleeing his own troubled family who becomes the grandson's unwitting accomplice; a poet str...

Mirroring Romania's drastic transition from totalitarianism to Western-style freedom in the late 1980s, "Mr. K Released" captures the disturbingly surreal feeling that many newly liberated prisoners face when they leave captivity. Employing his trade...

This is the first translation of Spanish poet Manuel Vilas's two major collections "Heaven" ("El cielo", 2000) and "Heat" ("Calor", 2008) into English. Thematically fuelled with alcohol, death and sex, they go off into freewheeling megalomaniacal fli...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! It's 1979 in Communist Czechoslovakia, ten years into the crushing period known as normalization, and Ludvik Vaculik has writer's block. It has been nearly a decade since he wrote his powe...

Western culture has been marked by deep divisions between action and contemplation, intervention and passivity, and decisiveness and withdrawal. Conceived as radical opposites, these terms structure the history of religion, philosophy, and political...

How can a person come to understand wars and hatreds well enough to explain them truthfully to a child? "The Bower" engages this timeless and thorny question through a recounting of the poet-speaker's year in Belfast, Ireland, with her young daughter...

Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's poetry dwells in spaces of paradox, seeking out the words, metaphors, and images that capture both the peaceful stillness of snow and the desperate cry of human experience. "A Cry in the Snow" often draws on these two fert...

Not for sale in Estonia! While the reputation of Remedios Varo (1908-63) the surrealist painter is now well established, Remedios Varo the writer has yet to be fully discovered. Her writings, which were never published during her life let alone tra...