Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! "Springtide" A chaffinch in a tree of cherry sings merrily spring's introit. Its blazing bobble dwells in leaves, alive, and swells in scarlet. The flowers are flares of white. The c...

After years on the job, police detective Jakob Franck has retired. Finally, the dead – with all their mysteries – will no longer have any claim on him. Or so he thinks. On a cold autumn afternoon, a case he thought he'd long put behind him returns t...

Toby Litt is one of that rare breed of fiction writers who never writes the same book twice: every time out, he takes an unexpected new tack – and his readers happily follow. ?Told in the form of the pithy, even lyrical advice a young soldier leaves...

Hans Magnus Enzensberger takes the title for this collection of daring short essays on topical themes – politics, economics, religion, society – not from Jeremy Bentham's famous prison but from a mid-1930s Cabinet of Curiosities opened in Germany by...

Hasan Azizul Huq is known for his stories that bring a powerful social consciousness to bear on the lives of ordinary people in contemporary Bangladesh – but doing so with surprising twists to what we think of as the typical grounds of realistic fict...

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay was one of the greatest writers in modern Bengali literature, best known for his autobiographical novel "Pather Panchali", which, along with another of Bandyopadhyay's books, formed the basis for Satyajit Ray's classic "A...

Austrian poet and playwright Ernst Jandl died in 2000, leaving behind his partner, poet Friederike Mayrocker – and bringing to an end a half century of shared life, and shared literary work. Mayrocker immediately began attempting to come to terms wit...

This powerful novel presents the early days of the transatlantic slave trade from a new perspective: that of the sub-Saharan population that became its first victims. Cameroonian novelist Leonora Miano presents a world on the brink of disappearing –...

Bangladesh in 1971 showed vividly, and terribly, the deadly effects of war. Piles of corpses, torture cells, ash and destruction everywhere in the wake of the Pakistani army's attacks on Bengali people. "Blue Venom" and "Forbidden Incense", two novel...

Few writers have ever experienced such a steady rise in their reputation and public profile as Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) has seen in recent years. As more of his previously little known work has been translated into English, readers have...