Norway. The 1800s. Endre must to take over the family farm from his father – his father, who swings the sickle and sharpens the scythe, and says this is the only way in which rocks and stones and mounts and waves can still be ours. But Endre is stran...

In our era of mass migration, much of it driven by war and its aftermath, "A Slap in the Face" could not be more timely. It tells the story of Karim, an Iraqi refugee living in Germany whose right to asylum has been revoked in the wake of Saddam Huss...

We learn more every year about the damaging effects of solitary confinement. This unquestionably cruel and unusual punishment leaves prisoners with no human contact, sometimes for years at a time, and it nearly always leads to lasting trauma. In "Sol...

From the 1920s through the 1950s, Bertolt Brecht wrote a number of short, fictionalized comments on contemporary life, politics, and thought. Through the dramatic events of the first half of the twentieth century, Brecht's Mr. Keuner offered up aphor...

In this novel from esteemed political writer Tariq Ali, a father, Vlady, loses his job when he refuses to renounce socialist beliefs in the newly unified Germany – and as a result wants to explain to his alienated son what their family's long and pas...

Rich and multilayered, with elements of both memoir and fiction, Dominique Edde's "Kite" defies categorization. Beginning in the 1960s and ending in the late '80s, it is at once a narrative of a passionate, and ultimately tragic, relationship between...

When "Life in Peactime" opens, on May 29, 2015, engineer Ivo Brandani is sixty-nine years old. He's disillusioned and angry – but morbidly attached to life. As he makes a day-long trip home from his job in Sharm el Sheik reconstructing the coral reef...

Richard I (1157-1199) was king of England from 1189 until his death, but he is best known as a soldier, not a monarch. He earned his moniker Richard the Lionheart as a knight and military leader, and his revolt against his father Henry II and his con...

Henrik Ibsen (1820-1908) is arguably the most important playwright of the nineteenth century. Globally he remains the most performed playwright after Shakespeare, and "Hedda Gabler", "A Doll's House", "Peer Gynt", and "Ghosts" are all masterpieces of...

Seated at a table in the celebrated Brasserie Lipp, the author experiences 'this in-/fernal ticking in the ink' and finds memory coming alive, recovering past moments as intensely alive, spots of time which vivify him and his past. Through memory and...