"Those who know me call me Old He, and they also know that I've worked in a crematorium for my entire life". Here begins Mu Cao's novel "In the Face of Death We Are Equal", an unrelentingly realistic portrait of working-class gay men in the underbell...

"Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language", said T. S. Eliot. We experience Baudelaire in myriad ways through his multifaceted writing. His sensuous poems – dreams of escape to an impossible, preferably tropical, el...

An actor of traditional Hindu dramas meets an adolescent girl who turns out to be his half-sister. A man returns to Goa from Mozambique to father a child for a family whose unmarried daughters has produced no heirs. Another man feels out of place in...

August 6, 1943. Chaim Soutine, a Jewish painter from Belorussia and a contemporary of Chagall, Modigliani, and Picasso, is hidden in a hearse that's traveling from a small town on the Loire towards Nazi-occupied Paris. Suffering from a stomach ulcer,...

There are many ways to travel between India and the UK in general, and Calcutta and Norwich in particular. You could take a plane and then the bus or the train, or perhaps a taxi. You could even sail. But what if you traveled via literature instead?...

On October 5, 2012, the German national newspaper Die Welt published its daily issue – but things looked... different. Quieter. The sensations of the day, forgotten as soon as they're read, were missing, replaced with an unprecedented calm, extracted...

"The day they found my brother with a blood stain, I found one on my kurta too, but no one noticed my blood stain". Thus begins the story of a young girl in Kashmir as she goes through the turbulence of adolescence in her conflict-ridden world. While...

"I think in pictures. Poems help me with this. They are like buoys in the sea. I swim to them, from one to the other. In between, without them, I am lost. They are the handholds where something masses together in the infinite expanse" – Anselm Kiefer...

The year is 1973. An Egyptian historian, Dr. Shukri, pursues a year of non-degree graduate studies in Moscow, the presumed heart of the socialist utopia. Through his eyes, the reader receives a guided tour of the sordid stagnation of Brezhnev-era Sov...

Using the same musical sense of language she applies to her translations, Nancy Naomi Carlson masterfully interprets herself in "An Infusion of Violets". The sometimes erotic, sometimes melancholy landscapes she creates as the self-appointed sitar's...