"Summer Resort", the first novel by noted translator Esther Kinsky, is set in a village somewhere on the endless Hungarian plain. It is the hottest summer in memory and everyone in the village dreams of the sweet life in Udulo, a summer resort on a r...

In "The Shadow-Boxing Woman", a novel from German writer Inka Parei, a decaying apartment building in post-Wall Berlin is home to Hell, a young woman with a passion for martial arts. When Hell's neighbor disappears she sets out across the city in sea...

One night in the middle of winter, as deep snow covers the mountains and forests, a doctor is crossing the ridge in Austria from Traich to Foding to see a patient. He stumbles over a body in the darkness and fears it is a corpse. But it's not a corps...

Hans Magnus Enzensberger has mastered poetry, novels, and the intricate balance between history and fiction, but he's never done anything quite like this before. For the writing of "Unlikely Progeny", Enzensberger developed a persona – Linda Quilt -c...

In "First Light", novelist Ralf Rothmann paints a delicate portrait of a twelve-year-old boy named Julian growing up in a mining community in 1960s Germany. The book covers only a few summer weeks, following Julian's gradual social and sexual awakeni...

If it takes only a few rogue financiers to collapse the economy, can one earnest investment officer save the dollar from collapse? Ken Murai, the protagonist of this fast-paced novel by Michael S. Koyama, is a young officer in the Japanese ministry o...

The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) is acknowledged as among the major writers of our time. The seven stories in this collection capture Bernhard's distinct darkly comic voice and vision – often compared to Kafka a...

Lakshmibai, the Queen of Jhansi, a legendary Indian heroine, led her troops against the British in the uprising of 1857, which is now widely described as the first Indian War of Independence. The image of the young warrior queen who died on the battl...

Unlike most of Mahasweta Devi's works, which focus on Bengali tribes and the rural dispossessed, the four stories collected in Bait are located in the urban and suburban criminal underworld, and form an unusual segment of Devi's oeuvre. The first s...

In this collection of essays, Ashis Nandy uses the metaphor of the future – imagined utopias, conceptions of cultural possibilities, social critiques of things to come – to redefine the present. Nandy's effort is to demonstrate that, in a world incre...