"My father bought me from the council for 365 francs", recalls the narrator in Monica Cantieni's novel 'The Encyclopaedia of Good Reasons'. She's a young girl, an immigrant to Switzerland whose adoption is yet to be finalized. When she finally moves...

"On the day of the Great Fall he left nothing, nothing at all behind". The latest work by Peter Handke, one of our greatest living writers, chronicles a day in life of an aging actor as he makes his way on foot from the outskirts of a great metropol...

Set in the 1970s and '80s, The Hangman's House narrates the life and times of a Hungarian family in Romania. Those were extraordinary times of oppression, poverty and hopelessness, and Andrea Tompa's latest novel depicts everyday life under the bruta...

For distinguished philosopher Hans Blumenberg, lions were a life-long obsession. "Lions", translated by Kari Driscoll, collects thirty-two of Blumenberg's philosophical vignettes to reveal that the figure of the lion unites two of his other great pre...

It's the early 1970s and Dion Katthusen, thirteen, is growing up fatherless in a small village in northern Germany. An only child plagued with a devastating stutter, Dion is ostracized by his peers and finds solace in the company of nature, collectin...

Any new book by poet, essayist, writer, and translator Hans Magnus Enzensberger, one of the most influential and internationally renowned German intellectuals, is cause for notice, and "Mr. Zed's Reflections" is no exception. Every afternoon for almo...

Jurek Becker (1937-1997) is best known for his novel "Jacob the Liar", which follows the life of a man, who, like Becker, lived in the Lodz ghetto during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. Throughout his career, Becker also wrote nonfic...

Should you find yourself strolling along the coastal heights of Douarnenez, a Brittany town near the westernmost point of continental France, you would do well to look out for a signpost marked, "Georges Perros (1923-1978) 'Dazzled by the sea'". Perr...

The narrator in Jean-Luc Benoziglio's "Privy Portrait" has fallen on hard times. His wife and young daughter have abandoned him, he has no work or prospects, he's blind in one eye, and he must move into a horribly tiny apartment with his only possess...

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is recognized as one of post-war German literature's most important novelists, poets, and playwrights. Influenced by Hans Weigel and the legendary literary circle Gruppe 47, Bachmann gained international renown for her p...