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,...

Western culture has been marked by deep divisions between action and contemplation, intervention and passivity, and decisiveness and withdrawal. Conceived as radical opposites, these terms structure the history of religion, philosophy, and political...

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,...

During a 1960 interview, East German writer Christa Wolf was asked a curious question: would she describe in detail what she did on September 27th? Fascinated by considering the significance of a single day over many years, Wolf began keeping a detai...