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...

In "The Avant-Garde", Mike Sell rejects the common idea that the avant-garde is only about art and insists that it is much more than a European phenomenon. In doing so, he redefines the historical, geographical, ideological, disciplinary, and theoret...

Cees Nooteboom, best known for his novel "The Following Story", is one of the most distinguished and significant authors living in the Netherlands today. "Self-Portrait of an Other" is one of the most unique and innovative works in his oeuvre. Writte...

The fascinus, or phallus, was at the heart of classical Roman art and life. No god was more represented in ancient Rome than the phallic deity Priapus, and the fescennine verses, one of the earliest forms of Roman poetry, accompanied the celebrations...

"Not writing is always a relief and sometimes a pleasure. Writing about what cannot be written, by contrast, is the devil's own job". In this unusual text, a blend of essay, fiction, and literary genealogy, South African novelist Ivan Vladislavic e...