Two fathers with two daughters: Martin, professor of German, writes but is studying Earth Sciences at MIT; Tariq, a doctor in Baghdad and Muna, is studying the archaeology of a region that is seen as the cradle of civilization. These two parallel rel...

Somewhere deep in the European forest they meet. Frontier workers, smugglers, refugees, workers, asylum seekers, inspectors, artists, musicians, actors, journalists, scholarship holders, logisticians, students, and ghosts. They come from everywhere....

In our era of mass migration, much of it driven by war and its aftermath, "A Slap in the Face" could not be more timely. It tells the story of Karim, an Iraqi refugee living in Germany whose right to asylum has been revoked in the wake of Saddam Huss...

We learn more every year about the damaging effects of solitary confinement. This unquestionably cruel and unusual punishment leaves prisoners with no human contact, sometimes for years at a time, and it nearly always leads to lasting trauma. In "Sol...

Breviaries, books of standard religious readings for particular denominations, are a familiar genre with a long pedigree. But you've definitely never seen a breviary like this one. "The Sex of the Angels" is a playful, often ironic take on the brevia...

This play by renowned poet and political activist Aime Cesaire recounts the tragic death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo Republic and an African nationalist hero. "A Season in the Congo" follows Lumumba's efforts to free the...

This powerful novel presents the early days of the transatlantic slave trade from a new perspective: that of the sub-Saharan population that became its first victims. Cameroonian novelist Leonora Miano presents a world on the brink of disappearing –...

Arwa Salih was a member of the political bureau of the Egyptian Communist Workers Party, which was founded in the wake of the Arab-Israeli War and the Egyptian student movement of the early 1970s. Written more than a decade after Salih quit the party...

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...

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...