When Anna discovers a long letter that her mother Marie wrote, Marie has been dead for some time, and Anna is shocked to learn that her mother disappeared with a secret. The letter is addressed to Marie's first great love, a much older teacher who sh...

Praised by Paul Auster as "one of the rare poets in the history of literature to have sustained the highest level of artistic excellence throughout an entire lifetime", Yves Bonnefoy is widely considered the foremost French poet of his generation. Pr...

A benign old monk listens to a prospective novice's tale of depravity, violence, and carnivorous excess while a nice little family drama – in which nearly everyone dies – unfurls. But in this tale of sharp hatchets, bad water, and a rusty WWII mortar...

In this novel by celebrated South African writer Zakes Mda, Kristin Uys, a tough magistrate who lives alone with her cat in the Roodepoort district of Johannesburg, goes on a one-woman crusade to wipe out prostitution in her town. Her reasons are per...

This collection of essays, fiction, poetry and discussions, derived from the cult Internet magazine "HumanitiesUnderground", provides entry into some of the most burning issues in the humanities in contemporary South Asia.  The anthology brings toget...

"In 1968-1969 I wanted to die, that is to say, stop living, being killed, but it was blocked on all sides", wrote Helene Cixous, esteemed French feminist, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and novelist. Instead of suicide, she began to dream o...

"The Emperor of Ice-Cream" tells the moving tale of an Italian family living in Scotland during the rise of Mussolini and his rule in Italy. The story is told from the point of view of Lucia, the family's daughter, who, at 83, reflects on her childho...

After the failed revolutions of 1848, Galicia has been brought under the rule of the Habsburg Empire, and the Zemka family find themselves embroiled in the struggle for Polish independence. This is a history of Eastern Europe told in miniature throug...

Franz Kafka was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His writing contributed greatly to existentialism, and the term "Kafkaesque" is now synonymous with the literature of the surreal, the complex and the illogical. His works...

Mahasweta Devi is one of India's foremost literary figures, a prolific and best-selling author in Bengali of short fiction and novels, and a deeply political social activist who has been working in marginalized communities for decades. "Old Women" te...