James Joyce's Ulysses first appeared in print in the pages of an American avant-garde magazine, The Little Review, between 1918 and 1920. The novel many consider to be the most important literary work of the twentieth century was, at the time, deemed...

This moving tale of imprisonment and escape, persecution and loss, is narrated by the daughter of an alleged Harki, an Algerian soldier who fought for the French during the Algerian War for Independence. It was the fate of such men to be twice exiled...

Alberto Manguel praises the Hungarian writer Laszlo Foldenyi as "one of the most brilliant essayists of our time". Foldenyi's extraordinary Melancholy, with its profusion of literary, ecclesiastical, artistic, and historical insights, gives proof to...

Set in Czechoslovakia between the 1940s and the 1990s, Tomas Zmeskal's stimulating novel focuses on one family's tragic story of love and the unspoken. Josef meets his wife, Kveta, before the Second World War at a public lecture on Hittite culture. K...

Curiosity has been seen through the ages as the impulse that drives our knowledge forward and the temptation that leads us toward dangerous and forbidden waters. The question "Why?" has appeared under a multiplicity of guises and in vastly different...

Franz Kafka was the poet of his own disorder. Throughout his life he struggled with a pervasive sense of shame and guilt that left traces in his daily existence – in his many letters, extensive diaries, and especially in his fiction. This stimulating...

A classic of Modern Persian literature, Charand-o Parand (Stuff and Nonsense) is a work familiar to every literate Iranian. Originally a series of newspaper columns written by scholar and satirist Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda, the pieces poke fun at mullahs, t...

Well before publishing the "Lives of the Poets", Samuel Johnson was an accomplished biographer, having written the lives of numerous scholars, scientists, philosophers, critics, and theologians (including Peter Burnham, Sir Thomas Browne, and Confuci...

Noah Warren's brilliant collection of poetry, "The Destroyer in the Glass", is the 110th recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, the oldest annual literary award in the United States. Warren explores universal themes of isolation and the...

Rarely does a European or American child grow up without an introduction to Hans Christian Andersen's "The Ugly Duckling", "The Princess and the Pea", or "Thumbelina". Andersen began publishing his fairy tales in 1835, and they brought him almost imm...