We are surrounded by images, fairly drowning in them. From our cell phones to our computers, from our televisions at home to the screens that light up while we wait in the grocery store checkout line, images of all kinds are seducing us, commanding u...

Maryse Conde is one of the best-known and most beloved French Caribbean literary voices. The author of more than twenty novels, she was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2015 and has long been recognized as a giant of black femini...

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...

Max Frisch (1911-1991) was a giant of twentieth-century German literature. When Frisch moved into a new apartment in Berlin's Sarrazinstrasse, he began keeping a journal, which he came to call the Berlin Journal. A few years later, he emphasized in a...

The international community of letters mourned the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France's greatest poets of the last half century. A prolific author, he was often considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize and publish...

In "The Red Sofa", we meet Anne, a young woman setting off on the Trans-Siberian Railway in order to find her former lover, Gyl, who left twenty years before. As the train moves across post-Soviet Russia and its devastated landscapes, Anne reflects o...

In 2010, Robert Menasse journeyed to Brussels to begin work on a novel centered on the European Union. His extended stay resulted in a completely different book – "Enraged Citizens, European Peace and Democratic Deficiencies", a work of nonfiction ex...

"The Aftermath of War" brings together essays written in Sartre's most creative period, just after World War II. Sartre's extraordinary range of engagement is manifest, with writings on post-war America, the social impact of war in Europe, contempora...

Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre counted among his friends and associates some of the most esteemed intellectuals, writers, and artists of the twentieth century. In "Portraits" ("Situations IV"), Sartre collected his impressions and accounts of many of h...

"Critical Essays" ("Situations I") contains essays on literature and philosophy from a highly formative period of French philosopher and leading existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre's life, the years between 1938 and 1946. This period is particularly inte...