From the 1920s through the 1950s, Bertolt Brecht wrote a number of short, fictionalized comments on contemporary life, politics, and thought. Through the dramatic events of the first half of the twentieth century, Brecht's Mr. Keuner offered up aphor...

In this novel from esteemed political writer Tariq Ali, a father, Vlady, loses his job when he refuses to renounce socialist beliefs in the newly unified Germany – and as a result wants to explain to his alienated son what their family's long and pas...

Rich and multilayered, with elements of both memoir and fiction, Dominique Edde's "Kite" defies categorization. Beginning in the 1960s and ending in the late '80s, it is at once a narrative of a passionate, and ultimately tragic, relationship between...

When "Life in Peactime" opens, on May 29, 2015, engineer Ivo Brandani is sixty-nine years old. He's disillusioned and angry – but morbidly attached to life. As he makes a day-long trip home from his job in Sharm el Sheik reconstructing the coral reef...

Richard I (1157-1199) was king of England from 1189 until his death, but he is best known as a soldier, not a monarch. He earned his moniker Richard the Lionheart as a knight and military leader, and his revolt against his father Henry II and his con...

"I now no longer use the better words" Ilse Aichinger (1921-2016) was one of the most important writers of postwar Austrian and German literature. Born in 1921 to a Jewish mother, she survived World War II in Vienna, while her twin sister Helga esca...

"The Dancing Other" takes readers to France and Martinique to reveal the struggles of people who belong both places, but never quite feel at home in either. Suzanne Dracius tells the story of Rehvana, a woman who feels she is too black to fit in when...

Thomas Bernhard's "Old Masters" has been called his "most enjoyable novel" by the New York Review of Books. It's a wild satire that takes place almost entirely in front of Tintoretto's "White-Bearded Man", on display in the Kunsthistorisches Museum,...

Iraqi poet Salah Al Hamdani has lived a remarkable life. The author of some forty books in French and Arabic, he began life as a child laborer, with little or no education. As a political prisoner under Saddam Hussein, he learned to read and write Ar...

"'Blue jewellery" is private property. Not to be seen. Not to be talked about. It is worn like a bracelet around the wrists, on ribs, legs, arms. Blue jewellery is another name for the marks left on women's bodies, inflicted by the men around them....