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...

In "The Pilgrim's Bowl", Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet meditates on the work of Italian artist Giorgio Morandi and its power to evoke a complexity of emotions and astonishment. Jaccottet examines Morandi's ascetic still lifes, contrasting his artisti...

A dance begins beneath the outstretched branches of the giant umunyinya tree in Rwanda. First there is drumming and clapping, then the lead dancers step into the center of the gathering. The dancing subsides and the gacaca court, the community hearin...

"Pop Goes the Avant-Garde: Experimental Theatre in Contemporary China" is the first comprehensive review of the history and development of avant-garde drama and theater in the People's Republic of China since 1976. Drawing on a range of critical pers...

Djibouti, a hot, impoverished little country on the Horn of Africa, is a place of great strategic importance, for off its coast lies a crucial passage for the world's oil. In this novel by Abdourahman A. Waberi, Djibril, a young Djiboutian voluntaril...

The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) is acknowledged as among the major writers of our time. The seven stories in this collection capture Bernhard's distinct darkly comic voice and vision – often compared to Kafka a...

From the Greeks and Shakespeare to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, war has often been a major theme of dramatic performances. However, many of the most extraordinary theater projects in recent years not only have been about war but also have origin...

Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938), an original Bolshevik leader and a founder of the Soviet state, spent the last year of his life imprisoned by Stalin, awaiting a trial and eventual execution. Remarkably during that time, from March 1937 to March 1938, B...

"Palaeoperformance" is a pioneering work which examines the emergence of theatricality at the birth of human societies. In the Upper Paleolithic period, over 30,000 years ago, archaeological and art historical evidence reveals the very beginnings of...