Norway. The 1800s. Endre must to take over the family farm from his father – his father, who swings the sickle and sharpens the scythe, and says this is the only way in which rocks and stones and mounts and waves can still be ours. But Endre is stran...

In our era of mass migration, much of it driven by war and its aftermath, "A Slap in the Face" could not be more timely. It tells the story of Karim, an Iraqi refugee living in Germany whose right to asylum has been revoked in the wake of Saddam Huss...

We learn more every year about the damaging effects of solitary confinement. This unquestionably cruel and unusual punishment leaves prisoners with no human contact, sometimes for years at a time, and it nearly always leads to lasting trauma. In "Sol...

From the 1920s through the 1950s, Bertolt Brecht wrote a number of short, fictionalized comments on contemporary life, politics, and thought. Through the dramatic events of the first half of the twentieth century, Brecht's Mr. Keuner offered up aphor...

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1977) is considered one of the great rationalist thinkers of the seventeenth century. His magnum opus, "Ethics", in which he criticized the dualism of Descartes, solidified his reputation and greatly influenced the Enlightenment...

In this novel from esteemed political writer Tariq Ali, a father, Vlady, loses his job when he refuses to renounce socialist beliefs in the newly unified Germany – and as a result wants to explain to his alienated son what their family's long and pas...

Rich and multilayered, with elements of both memoir and fiction, Dominique Edde's "Kite" defies categorization. Beginning in the 1960s and ending in the late '80s, it is at once a narrative of a passionate, and ultimately tragic, relationship between...

The BBC commissioned Tariq Ali to write a three-part TV series on the circumstances leading to the overthrow, trial and execution of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the first elected Prime Minister of Pakistan. As rehearsals were about to begin, the BBC hierarc...

When "Life in Peactime" opens, on May 29, 2015, engineer Ivo Brandani is sixty-nine years old. He's disillusioned and angry – but morbidly attached to life. As he makes a day-long trip home from his job in Sharm el Sheik reconstructing the coral reef...

Richard I (1157-1199) was king of England from 1189 until his death, but he is best known as a soldier, not a monarch. He earned his moniker Richard the Lionheart as a knight and military leader, and his revolt against his father Henry II and his con...