Banaphool – which means wildflower – was the pen name of beloved Bengali writer Balaichand Mukhopadhyay (1899-1979). "Wildfire" brings together forty-five short pieces by Banaphool that are brilliantly representative of his uncompromising, multifacet...

A young woman who has been living abroad returns to her hometown of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. Her sister Ines – a beautiful, impetuous painter – who still lives there, soon appears and promptly asks for financial help. But the returning sister kn...

"Ruven Preuk stands apart from the village, on an August day in 1911, and listens". Thus begins an epic bildungsroman about the life of Ruven Preuk, son of the wainwright, child of a sleepy village in Germany's north, where life is both simple and ha...

Two men talk in Tokyo. One, a Belgian, is a diplomat. The other, Dutch, is a photographer. What, they wonder, is the real face of Japan? How can they get beyond the European idea of the nation and its people – with its exoticism – and see Japan as it...

London between the wars was a place of anxiety and uncertainty. After the postwar boom of the 1920s, the aftereffects of the stock market crash hit London and, even as the fortunes of the aristocracy went into decline, there was hunger and a rising t...

Since premiering his pioneering linguistic experiment "I Love XXX" in Beijing nearly twenty-five years ago, Meng Jinghui has been credited with revitalizing Chinese theater by popularizing the avant-garde. Mixing high culture with mass culture, his p...

At a time when Turkey is struggling for its secular identity, resisting the influence of ISIS, and finding itself at the heart of the European refugee crisis, accomplished Turkish playwright Ozen Yula offers a deep, artistic portrait of the country a...

During a 1960 interview, East German writer Christa Wolf was asked a curious question: would she describe in detail what she did on September 27th? Fascinated by considering the significance of a single day over many years, Wolf began keeping a detai...

"At the Burning Abyss" is Franz Fuhmann's magnum opus – a gripping and profoundly personal encounter with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of two troubled lives, a turbulent century, and the liberating power of poetry. P...

Since his first collection of poetry appeared in 1953, Philippe Jaccottet has sought to express the ineffable that lies at the heart of our material world in his essential, elemental poetry. As one of Switzerland's most prominent and prolific men of...