The work of poet Georg Trakl, a leading Austrian-German expressionist, has been praised by many, including his contemporaries Rainer Maria Rilke and Else Lasker-Schuler, as well as his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein famously wrote that whil...

Max Frisch (1911-1991) was a giant of twentieth-century German literature. When Frisch moved into a new apartment in Berlin's Sarrazinstrasse, he began keeping a journal, which he came to call the Berlin Journal. A few years later, he emphasized in a...

The international community of letters mourned the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France's greatest poets of the last half century. A prolific author, he was often considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize and publish...

In "The Red Sofa", we meet Anne, a young woman setting off on the Trans-Siberian Railway in order to find her former lover, Gyl, who left twenty years before. As the train moves across post-Soviet Russia and its devastated landscapes, Anne reflects o...

A man scours the town he left fifty years ago for some modest evidence of past joys. Javed, who has returned to Lahore from East Pakistan, won't speak of what he witnessed in his time away. In her dreams, an old woman boards a train full of dead ance...

"The Aftermath of War" brings together essays written in Sartre's most creative period, just after World War II. Sartre's extraordinary range of engagement is manifest, with writings on post-war America, the social impact of war in Europe, contempora...

"Critical Essays" ("Situations I") contains essays on literature and philosophy from a highly formative period of French philosopher and leading existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre's life, the years between 1938 and 1946. This period is particularly inte...

In the historic tradition of calendar stories and calendar illustrations, author and film director Alexander Kluge and celebrated visual artist Gerhard Richter have composed "December", a collection of thirty-nine stories and thirty-nine snow-swept p...

This acclaimed novel is set during the Lebanese Civil War and offers a rare depiction of women's experiences amid this sprawling, region-defining conflict. In Alawiya Sobh's hands, the details of everyday life mix with female voices from across class...

One night, German philosopher Hans Blumenberg returns to his study to find a shocking sight – a lion lying on the floor as if it's the most natural thing in the world. The lion stretches comfortably on the Turkmen rug, eyes resting on Blumenberg. The...