In 1936, Walter Benjamin defined the revolutionary class as being in opposition to a dense and dangerous crowd, prone to fear of the foreign, and under the spell of anti-Semitic madness. Today, in formations great or small, that sad figure returns –...

When a young reader once asked Franz Fuhmann if he considered his work to be science fiction, he was quick to deny it: he wanted nothing to do with the genre. As he began writing the stories that make up this volume, however, he found himself coming...

On the eve of the 2007 general elections in Morocco, writer, academic, and former cabinet minister Abdallah Saaf embarked on several road trips across the country to get a feel for how its citizens had fared since Mohammed VI's accession to the thron...

Paul Celan (1920-1970) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is recognized as one of pos...

Science has given us several explanations for how humans evolved from walking on four limbs to two feet. None, however, is as riveting as what master storyteller Ngugi wa Thiong'o offers in "The Upright Revolution". Blending myth and folklore with an...

The perfect book for paranoid times, "I" introduces us to W, a mere hanger-on in East Berlin's postmodern underground literary scene. All is not as it appears, though, as W is actually a Stasi informant who reports to the mercurial David Bowie look-a...

This novel by esteemed Swiss writer Max Frisch is an exploration of the question: "Why don't we live when we know we're here just this one time, just one single, unrepeatable time in this unutterably magnificent world?!" This outcry against the empti...

"Gone, finito, The End, I say. A father who puts an end to it all before he wears down the whole family deserves more praise than damnation". Two sisters travel to Sofia – in a convoy of luxury limousines arranged by a fellow Bulgarian exile – to...

Christa Wolf was arguably the best-known and most influential writer in the former East Germany. Having grown up during the Nazi regime, she and her family were forced to flee their home like many others, nearly starving to death in the process. Her...

The work of poet Georg Trakl, a leading Austrian-German expressionist, has been praised by many, including his contemporaries Rainer Maria Rilke and Else Lasker-Schuler, as well as his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein, who famously wrote that while he did...