The inner workings of the European Union are as much a mystery to those living within its confines as they are to those of us who reside elsewhere. The Brussels bureaucracy that sets many of the EU's policies feels remote to its citizens, yet the inf...

Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is recognized as one of the most important novelists, poets, and playwrights of postwar German literature. As befitting such a versatile writer, her "War Diary" is not a day-by-day journal but a series of...

These essays by Petra Christine Hardt, head of the rights department at esteemed German publisher Suhrkamp Verlag, offer unique and informed insight into day-to-day practices in the rights and permissions departments of publishing houses. Hardt also...

"Summer Resort", the first novel by noted translator Esther Kinsky, is set in a village somewhere on the endless Hungarian plain. It is the hottest summer in memory and everyone in the village dreams of the sweet life in Udulo, a summer resort on a r...

In "The Shadow-Boxing Woman", a novel from German writer Inka Parei, a decaying apartment building in post-Wall Berlin is home to Hell, a young woman with a passion for martial arts. When Hell's neighbor disappears she sets out across the city in sea...

In this play by Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch, a middle-aged behavioral researcher Kurmann is given the opportunity to start his life over at any point he chooses and change his decisions and actions in matters both serious and mundane – H...

In these 99 meditations, poet and novelist Hans Magnus Enzensberger celebrates the tenacity of the normal and routine in everyday life, where the survival of the objects we use without thinking – a pair of scissors, perhaps – is both a small, human v...