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...

For more than sixty years, Ngugi wa Thiong'o has been writing fearlessly the questions, challenges, histories, and futures of Africans, particularly those of his homeland, Kenya. In his work, which has included plays, novels, and essays, Ngugi narrat...

Few of us have had the opportunity to visit Djibouti, the small crook of a country strategically located in the Horn of Africa, which makes "The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper" all the more seductive. In his first collection...

In the wildly entertaining novel "The Blue Soda Siphon", the narrator unexpectedly finds himself back in the world of his childhood: Switzerland in the 1940s. He returns to his childhood home to find his parents frantic because their son is missing....

The Lectures on Poetics Series at the University of Frankfurt VI has hosted many illustrious speakers at its lectern, including Ingeborg Bachmann, Theodor Adorno, and Heinrich Boll. At the beginning of 2007, Urs Widmer – described by the "Independent...

An iconic work of Western art, Fragonard's "L'escarpolette", or "The Swing", is often reproduced and its famous foreground image of a young woman losing her slipper mid-swing is widely familiar. In "Reckitt's Blue", John Wilkinson explores that well-...

In this companion to Urs Widmer's novel "My Mother's Lover", the narrator is again the son who pieces together the fragments of his parents' stories. Since the age of twelve, Karl, the father, has observed the family tradition of recording his life i...

Djibouti, a hot, impoverished little country on the Horn of Africa, is a place of great strategic importance, for off its coast lies a crucial passage for the world's oil. In this novel by Abdourahman A. Waberi, Djibril, a young Djiboutian voluntaril...

It's Switzerland in the 1920s when the two lovers first meet. She is young, beautiful, and rich. In contrast, he can barely support himself and is interested only in music. By the end of their lives, he is a famous conductor and the richest man in th...

This book analyses the development of Jinnah's relationship with India's Muslims from his entry into politics until 1934. It shows that a dominant view of Jinnah – that he was an ambassador of Hindu Muslim unity in the 1920s who became a communalist...