Toby Litt is one of that rare breed of fiction writers who never writes the same book twice: every time out, he takes an unexpected new tack – and his readers happily follow. ?Told in the form of the pithy, even lyrical advice a young soldier leaves...

Hans Magnus Enzensberger takes the title for this collection of daring short essays on topical themes – politics, economics, religion, society – not from Jeremy Bentham's famous prison but from a mid-1930s Cabinet of Curiosities opened in Germany by...

In her landmark study "Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre", Jill Dolan departed from historical writings on utopia, which suggest that social reorganization and the redistribution of wealth are utopian efforts, to argue instead that u...

Hasan Azizul Huq is known for his stories that bring a powerful social consciousness to bear on the lives of ordinary people in contemporary Bangladesh – but doing so with surprising twists to what we think of as the typical grounds of realistic fict...

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay was one of the greatest writers in modern Bengali literature, best known for his autobiographical novel "Pather Panchali", which, along with another of Bandyopadhyay's books, formed the basis for Satyajit Ray's classic "A...

Austrian poet and playwright Ernst Jandl died in 2000, leaving behind his partner, poet Friederike Mayrocker – and bringing to an end a half century of shared life, and shared literary work. Mayrocker immediately began attempting to come to terms wit...

Few figures in cinema history are as towering as Russian filmmaker and theorist Sergei Mikhailovitch Eisenstein (1898-1948). Not only did Eisenstein direct some of the most important and lasting works of the silent era, including "Strike", "October",...

This play by renowned poet and political activist Aime Cesaire recounts the tragic death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo Republic and an African nationalist hero. "A Season in the Congo" follows Lumumba's efforts to free the...

Today, we believe that the map is a copy of the Earth, without realizing that the opposite is true: in our culture the Earth has assumed the form of a map. In "Blinding Polyphemus", Franco Farinelli elucidates the philosophical correlation between cu...

This powerful novel presents the early days of the transatlantic slave trade from a new perspective: that of the sub-Saharan population that became its first victims. Cameroonian novelist Leonora Miano presents a world on the brink of disappearing –...