How, in 1930, did Alfred Wegener, the son of minister from Berlin, find himself in the most isolated spot on earth, attempting to survive an unthinkably cold winter in the middle of Greenland? In "All the Land", Jo Lendle sets out to chronicle Wegene...

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...

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...

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...

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 It tells the story of Karim, an Iraqi refugee living in Germany whose right to asylum has been revoked in the wake of Saddam Huss...

From the 1920s through the 1950s, Bertolt Brecht wrote a number of short, fictionalized comments on contemporary life, politics, and thought. Through the dramatic events of the first half of the twentieth century, Brecht's Mr. Keuner offered up aphor...

"I now no longer use the better words" Ilse Aichinger (1921-2016) was one of the most important writers of postwar Austrian and German literature. Born in 1921 to a Jewish mother, she survived World War II in Vienna, while her twin sister Helga esca...

Northern Spain is the only part of Western Europe where anarchism played a significant role in political life of the twentieth century. Enjoying wide-ranging support among both the urban and rural working class, its importance peaked during its "brie...

Thomas Bernhard's "Old Masters" has been called his "most enjoyable novel" by the New York Review of Books. It's a wild satire that takes place almost entirely in front of Tintoretto's "White-Bearded Man", on display in the Kunsthistorisches Museum,...