Peter Handke, a giant of Austrian literature, has produced decades of fiction, poetry, and drama informed by some of the most tumultuous events in modern history. But even as these events shaped his work, the presence of his mother – a woman whose li...

Published in 1899, Muhammad Hadi Ruswa's famous novel, "Umrao Jaan Ada", created a sensation when it came out, with its candid fictionalized account of Umrao Jaan, based on a renowned Lucknow courtesan and poetess of the same name. Considered by many...

While living in exile with his family on the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy, Victor Hugo wrote some of his greatest poetry and prose, including "Les Miserables" and two epic poems: "Dieu" and "La Fin de Satan".Dieu" pictures the imaginary...

In his sixth collection, Mark Halliday continues to seek ways of using the smart playfulness of such poets as Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch to explore life's emotional mysteries – both dire and hilarious – from the perpetual dissolving of our past to...

Political theology is a distinctly modern problem, one that takes shape in some of the most important theoretical writings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But its origins stem from the early modern period, in medieval iconographies of sa...

"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...

"All Just", David Herd's second Carcanet collection, makes poems from the fractured phrases and competing idioms of contemporary movement, its translations between public and private spaces. Conversations start and are broken off. Public announcement...

Published to mark the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth, this book celebrates the greatest of English novelists by illustrating some of his abiding preoccupations. Prompted by quotations from the novels and other writings, each themed chapter expl...

James Harpur's fifth collection journeys into realms seen and unseen, ranging from the landscapes of Ireland to the visionary realms of the mystics. Through the finely textured music of his poems, he explores emotional and spiritual intimacies while...

It is a common belief that scripture has no place in modern, secular politics. Graham Hammill challenges this notion in "The Mosaic Constitution", arguing that Moses's constitution of Israel, which created people bound by the rule of law, was central...