Fairy tales are supposed to be magical, surprising, and exhilarating, an enchanting counterpoint to everyday life that nonetheless helps us understand and deal with the anxieties of that life. Today, however, fairy tales are far from marvelous – in t...

In this collection of short stories, Avinuo Kire tells powerful tales of women overcoming violence and repression. In "The Power to Forgive", many of the stories are told against the backdrop of the struggle for Nagaland's independence from India. Ye...

The work of poet Georg Trakl, a leading Austrian-German expressionist, has been praised by many, including his contemporaries Rainer Maria Rilke and Else Lasker-Schuler, as well as his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein famously wrote that whil...

Indonesia, South Africa, Estonia, Lithuania, Shetland, Nicaragua – many worlds meet in these poems as nature dyes Sujata Bhatt's many languages with its own hues. The real merges with the surreal and the allegorical, certainties are undone in an open...

"Plash & Levitation" delves into the chaotic sublime of fatherhood, the candid revelations of youth, and the lingering consequences of history. Adam Tavel's revealing and imaginative poems are joined by fictional monologues from historical figures an...

Penny Dreadfuls: Sensational Tales of Terror is an anthology of twenty tales of horror and the supernatural published in the nineteenth century. In addition to works by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins!, and other well...

Elaine Feinstein has always written with most intensity about people. In this book, she remembers friends she has loved, writers she has known and literary figures from the past. She writes of the Russian poet Bella Akhmadulina with tender admiration...

A benign old monk listens to a prospective novice's tale of depravity, violence, and carnivorous excess while a nice little family drama – in which nearly everyone dies – unfurls. But in this tale of sharp hatchets, bad water, and a rusty WWII mortar...

Marjorie Perloff writes in her preface to "Poetics in a New Key" that when she learned David Jonathan Y. Bayot wanted to publish a collection of her interviews and essays, she was "at once honored and mystified".  But to Perloff's surprise and her re...

Virginia Woolf once commented that the central image in "Robinson Crusoe" is an object – a large earthenware pot. Woolf and other critics pointed out that early modern prose is full of things but bare of setting and description. Explaining how the em...