Under the Israeli occupation of the '70s and '80s, writers in Gaza had to go to considerable lengths to ever have a chance of seeing their work in print. Manuscripts were written out longhand, invariably under pseudonyms, and smuggled out of the Stri...

Modern theory needs a history lesson. Neither Marx nor Nietzsche first gave us theory – Hegel did. To support this contention, Andrew Cole's "The Birth of Theory" presents a refreshingly clear and lively account of the origins and legacy of Hegel's d...

Kiki Dimoula's poetry – the most praised and prized in contemporary Greek literature – is a paradox, both mysteriously intricate and widely popular. Her magic lens defamiliarizes all that is familiar, compressing distances between far-flung realms, c...

Long celebrated as one of "the Three Crowns" of Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) experimented widely with the forms of literature. His prolific and innovative writings – which range beyond the novella, from lyric to epic, from biography to my...

Edgar Allan Poe once claimed the greatest literary works were those that could be read "in one sitting". "Brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect", he argued, once the effect has been established, of course. The stori...

Andrew Piper grew up liking books and loving computers. While occasionally burying his nose in books, he was going to computer camp, programming his Radio Shack TRS-80, and playing Pong. His eventual love of reading made him a historian of the book a...

Paul Scott is most famous for his much-beloved tetralogy "The Raj Quartet", an epic that chronicles the end of the British rule in India with a cast of vividly and memorably drawn characters. Inspired by Scott's own time spent in India during World W...

Not for sale in Estonia! When Marcel Schwob published "The Book of Monelle" in French in 1894, it immediately became the unofficial bible of the French Symbolist movement, admired by such contemporaries as Stephane Mallarme, Alfred Jarry and Andre...

Programmable memories, fatherless reproduction, nano-tech implants, amphibian-powered scar treatment, full body modification, brain-scanning lie-detectors, inter-species reproduction, self-determining synthetic "green goo"... Which of these would yo...

"In Between Two Windows", his first book of poems, Oli Hazzard takes language out to stretch and flex and bend itself into new shapes. Into the formal straits of sestinas, sonnets and pantoums stray palindromes, mirrored poems, anagrams, allusions an...