Set in the 1970s and '80s, The Hangman's House narrates the life and times of a Hungarian family in Romania. Those were extraordinary times of oppression, poverty and hopelessness, and Andrea Tompa's latest novel depicts everyday life under the bruta...

The work of German poet Frederich Holderlin (1770-1843) has inspired countless poets and philosophers from Paul Celan to Rainer Maria Rilke to Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche. Yet, despite the international renown and respect his hymns and e...

A young woman who has been living abroad returns to her hometown of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. Her sister Ines – a beautiful, impetuous painter – who still lives there, soon appears and promptly asks for financial help. But the returning sister kn...

Writing in the long Bengali tradition exemplified by Rabindranath Tagore and Sukumar Ray, Annada Shankar Ray created poetry of ingenious rhyme and sound patterns, startling yet apt metaphors and descriptions, and dazzlingly imaginative subjects that...

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...

Rene Char (1907-1988) is considered the most important French poet of his generation. A member of the surrealists in the early 1930s, he became increasingly preoccupied by the rise of Nazi Germany and later played a key role in the French Resistance....

W. E. B. Du Bois has described the African American at the end of the nineteenth century as "two souls in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder". In the United States today, the hyphen between these two souls – A...

Hungarian Imre Kertesz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 for "writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history". His conversation with literary historian Thomas Cooper that is...

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...

"Histories for the Subordinated" brings together the key writings of David Hardiman, one of the foremost contemporary historians of the subcontinent. Hardiman's practice as a historian – his enormously rich empiricism, archival work, and fieldwork, a...