As a boy growing up in rural Italy in the 1930s, Dam?n is experiencing the first stirrings of adolescence when he accidentally sees his mother having sex with the local Fascist commandant. His pain, anger, and confusion are uncomfortably intertwined...

Cees Nooteboom wrote the poems that make up "Monk's Eye" on two islands: he began them on the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog and finished them on the Spanish island of Minorca, where he has spent summers for decades. The poems – which can be read in...

Breviaries, books of standard religious readings for particular denominations, are a familiar genre with a long pedigree. But you've definitely never seen a breviary like this one. "The Sex of the Angels" is a playful, often ironic take on the brevia...

As the Syrian war has raged over the past several years, the world has watched in horror. And that horror is particularly concentrated on the city of Aleppo, which has been subject to almost incomparable devastation and deprivation. Aleppo is Alice...

In contemporary Norwegian fiction Tomas Espedal's work stands out as uniquely personal; it can be difficult to separate the fiction from Espedal's own experiences. In that vein, his novel "Against Art" is not just the story of a boy growing up to be...

This lyrical novel tells the story of a young man living in Egypt in the 1990s, a time of great turmoil. We see student riots at Cairo University, radical politics, and the first steps towards the making of a writer. But his story is not told in isol...

Christa Wolf tried for years to find a way to write about her childhood in Nazi Germany. In her 1976 book "Patterns of Childhood", she explained why it was so difficult: "Gradually, over a period of months, the dilemma has emerged: to remain speechle...

This lyrical novel, set in the surroundings of the Palestinian village of Zakariyya, weaves a narrative rich in sensory detail yet troubled by the porousness of memory. It tells the story of the relationship between two figures of deep mythical reson...

The poems in this new volume by Abdourahman A. Waberi are introspective and inquisitive, reflecting a deep spiritual bond – with words, with the history of Islam and its great poets, with the landscapes those poets walked, among which Waberi grew up....

After years on the job, police detective Jakob Franck has retired. Finally, the dead – with all their mysteries – will no longer have any claim on him. Or so he thinks. On a cold autumn afternoon, a case he thought he'd long put behind him returns t...