In a world full of devils, the giant ape Kong defends what he loves the most. But who and what is this undomesticated animal? Might it reside within us? As we tread confidently, is this where the earth opens up beneath us?   In Kong's "Finest Hour",...

Alexander Kluge's work has long grappled with the Third Reich and its aftermath, and the extermination of the Jews forms its gravitational center. Kluge is forever reminding us to keep our present catastrophes in perspective – "calibrated" – against...

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...

Part "Odyssey" of the Persian Gulf and part "1001 Nights" in Europe, this debut novel is drawn from the author's experiences as a political prisoner and years as a refugee. Our hero Rasul Hamid describes the eight different ways that he fled his home...

"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...

Max Weber famously described politics as "a strong, slow drilling through hard boards with both passion and judgment". Taking this as his inspiration, Alexander Kluge brings readers yet another literary masterpiece. "Drilling through Hard Boards" is...

For a fifteen-year-old, falling in love can eclipse everything else in the world, and make a few short weeks feel like a lifetime of experience. In "Love Writ Large", Navid Kermani captures those intense feelings, from the emotional explosion of a fi...

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 It tells the story of Karim, an Iraqi refugee living in Germany whose right to asylum has been revoked in the wake of Saddam Huss...

No human quality is more necessary for survival than love. But while love has the power to lift us up with boundless joy, it has equal strength to crush us – it is easy to lose your way within love's complex labyrinth of oppositions. "The Labyrinth...

The thirteen stories of Michael Kruger's "The God behind the Window" capture the poignancy and cynicism of late life through tales of misanthropic old men full of the mixture of wisdom and melancholy that so often accompanies old age. In Kruger's sto...