Paul Celan (1920-1970) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is recognized as one of pos...

Science has given us several explanations for how humans evolved from walking on four limbs to two feet. None, however, is as riveting as what master storyteller Ngugi wa Thiong'o offers in "The Upright Revolution". Blending myth and folklore with an...

Western culture has been marked by deep divisions between action and contemplation, intervention and passivity, and decisiveness and withdrawal. Conceived as radical opposites, these terms structure the history of religion, philosophy, and political...

Friedrich Durrenmatt was one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century, a talent on par with Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bertolt Brecht. A prolific writer of letters, poems, novels, and shorter fictions,...

A pervasive assumption about the culture of the southern United States is that it is firmly rooted in an oral tradition, not a written one. Schweiger complicates our understanding of literacy and reading in the American South before emancipation by s...

A literary master's entertaining guide to reading with deeper insight, better understanding, and greater pleasure What makes a work of literature good or bad? How freely can the reader interpret it? Could a nursery rhyme like Baa Baa Black Sheep be f...

Universal equality is a treasured political concept in France, but recent anxiety over the country's Muslim minority has led to an emphasis on a new form of universalism, one promoting loyalty to the nation at the expense of all ethnic and religious...

The ruler of a totalitarian state seeks validation from a former schoolmate, now the nation's foremost thinker, in order to access a cultural cache alien to his regime. A literary critic provides commentary on an unfinished poem that both foretells...

Rage and obstinacy are close relatives – and fundamental categories in the work of both Georg Baselitz and Alexander Kluge. In "World-Changing Rage", these two accomplished German creators explore links and fractures between two cultures through two...

In this enchanting book, Merav Mack and Benjamin Balint explore Jerusalem's libraries to tell the story of this city as a place where some of the world's most enduring ideas were put into words. The writers of Jerusalem, although renowned the world o...