Reinhard Jirgl's strikingly individual novel The Fire Above, the Mountain Below demonstrates that he is not only unorthodox in his approach to language, but also difficult to pin down in terms of any genre. Weaving together elements of crime story, C...

Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek is known as a writer who works in response to contemporary crises and cultural phenomena. Perhaps none of her works display that quality as clearly as "On the Royal Road". Three weeks after Donald Trump's election,...

Komotau, the Czech Republic, late summer, 1945. Four women – seventy-year-old Johanna, her two daughters Hanna and Maria, and Hanna's daughter Anna – are ordered by the new Czech authorities to leave their homes and assemble with other Germans at the...

For much of her career, Elfriede Jelinek has been maligned in the press for both her unrelenting critique of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. Despite this, her central role in shaping contempora...

In recent years, the refugee problem has become impossible to ignore, as multiple crises in the Middle East and Africa have driven thousands of desperate people to attempt Mediterranean crossings in hopes of reaching Europe, and safety. Many have die...