The year is 1973. An Egyptian historian, Dr. Shukri, pursues a year of non-degree graduate studies in Moscow, the presumed heart of the socialist utopia. Through his eyes, the reader receives a guided tour of the sordid stagnation of Brezhnev-era Sov...

While presenting the Nobel Prize in Literature to J. M. G. Le Clezio in 2008, the Nobel Committee called him the "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization". In M...

In this book, Sumanta Banerjee analyzes the development of the folk culture of Calcutta's urban poor following the establishment of the British colonial system in Bengal. Consisting primarily of traditional artisans who migrated from neighboring vill...

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...