"Letters to Madeleine" collects for the first time in English the remarkable letters and poems sent by French poet Guillaume Apollinaire to his fiancee Madeleine Pages during World War I. Stationed in the trenches of Champagne, this man of letters wh...

In "First Light", novelist Ralf Rothmann paints a delicate portrait of a twelve-year-old boy named Julian growing up in a mining community in 1960s Germany. The book covers only a few summer weeks, following Julian's gradual social and sexual awakeni...

French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes was one of the leading influences on the post-structuralist movement in twentieth-century literary thought, and some of his best-known works, like S-Z, speak directly to the essential and indivi...

If it takes only a few rogue financiers to collapse the economy, can one earnest investment officer save the dollar from collapse? Ken Murai, the protagonist of this fast-paced novel by Michael S. Koyama, is a young officer in the Japanese ministry o...

The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) is acknowledged as among the major writers of our time. The seven stories in this collection capture Bernhard's distinct darkly comic voice and vision – often compared to Kafka a...

Lakshmibai, the Queen of Jhansi, a legendary Indian heroine, led her troops against the British in the uprising of 1857, which is now widely described as the first Indian War of Independence. The image of the young warrior queen who died on the battl...

Set in Malaya during the British protectorate, Sartre's "Typhus" centres on the improbable couple formed by the disgraced former doctor Georges, who has sunk to the lowest depths of a highly stratified colonial society, and Nellie, a down-at-heel nig...

Unlike most of Mahasweta Devi's works, which focus on Bengali tribes and the rural dispossessed, the four stories collected in Bait are located in the urban and suburban criminal underworld, and form an unusual segment of Devi's oeuvre. The first s...

In these 99 meditations, poet and novelist Hans Magnus Enzensberger celebrates the tenacity of the normal and routine in everyday life, where the survival of the objects we use without thinking – a pair of scissors, perhaps – is both a small, human v...

In "Carnival and Cannibal", distinguished French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) reflects on many of his most significant ideas concerning the significance of language and the relationship between the technological and the social. In this,...