With subtle, bemused humor and an unerring eye for human frailty, Michel Layaz writes about the hidden tensions within families, the awkwardness of adolescence, and the drama of intimacy between friends and lovers. His fifth novel, "My Mother's Tears...

It's the mid-to-late 1800s and the British have banished Wajid Ali Shah – the nawab of Awadh in Lucknow – to Calcutta. To the sound of the soulful melody of the sarangi, the mercurial courtesan Laayl-e Aasman is playing a dangerous game of love, loya...

It's Berlin in the summer of 2003 – sunshine for weeks on end, weather to fall in love. And that's just what Christian Eich, the main character in Ulrich Peltzer's acclaimed novel "Part of the Solution", does; but that's not all. Christian Eich, a th...

The thirteen stories of Michael Kruger's "The God behind the Window" capture the poignancy and cynicism of late life through tales of misanthropic old men full of the mixture of wisdom and melancholy that so often accompanies old age. In Kruger's sto...

Two fathers with two daughters: Martin, professor of German, writes but is studying Earth Sciences at MIT; Tariq, a doctor in Baghdad and Muna, is studying the archaeology of a region that is seen as the cradle of civilization. These two parallel rel...

Victoria has just recently moved from Zurich back to her hometown of Bucharest when the bank where she works is robbed. Put on leave so that she can process the trauma of the robbery, Victoria strolls around town. Each street triggers sudden visions...

The year is 323 bce. King Alexander of Macedonia – Alexander the Great – lies paralyzed by poison in his palace in Babylon. He is thirty-two years old, had Aristotle as a mentor, and is the greatest military commander the world has ever seen. At the...

No human quality is more necessary for survival than love. But while love has the power to lift us up with boundless joy, it has equal strength to crush us – it is easy to lose your way within love's complex labyrinth of oppositions. "The Labyrinth...

For a fifteen-year-old, falling in love can eclipse everything else in the world, and make a few short weeks feel like a lifetime of experience. In "Love Writ Large", Navid Kermani captures those intense feelings, from the emotional explosion of a fi...

Like stars in the sky, pixels may seem like tiny, individual points. But, when viewed from a distance, they can create elaborate images. Each pixel contributes to this array, but no individual point can create the whole. The thirty stories that compr...