"Mean, arrogant, naïve, sadistic on occasion, the young Henri Butron records his life story on tape just before death catches up with him. A death passed off as a suicide by his killers, French secret service agents who need to hush up their role-and Butron's-in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of a leading opposition leader from a third-world African nation in the throes of postcolonial civil war. The N'Gustro Affair is a thinly veiled retelling...

"It is not unusual for a writer to be pigeonholed, but few great writers have suffered from this more than Teffi. Several of her finest works are extremely bleak, but many Russians still know only the comic and satirical sketches she wrote during her first years as a professional writer, from 1909 until the First World War. Few critics and scholars have recognized the full breadth of her human sympathy, her Chekhovian ability to write equally convincingly...

"First published in 1963, The Stone Face tells the tale of a young African-American man who takes refuge from American racism in France, only to find himself complicit in a racist order of another sort. Simeon Brown, a journalist who, as a teenager, lost an eye in a racist attack, lives in his native Philadelphia in a state of agonizing tension, and after a violent encounter with some white sailors on shore leave, he decides to pack up and leave for...

"The Strudlhof Steps is an unsurpassed portrait of Vienna in the twentieth century, a novel crowded with characters who range from an elegant, alcoholic Prussian aristocrat, to an innocent ingénue, to "respectable" shopkeepers and tireless sexual adventurers, bohemians, grifters, and honest working-class folk. The greatest character in the book, however, is the city of Vienna, its streets and surrounding hills and woods depicted by Heimito von Doderer...

"Collection of new translations of Rumi's poems"--

"Victor Serge (1890-1947) was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich to Russian anti-czarist exiles, impoverished intellectuals living "by chance" in Brussels. A precocious anarchist firebrand, young Victor was sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary in 1912. Expelled to Spain in 1917, he participated in an anarcho-syndicalist uprising before leaving to join the Revolution in Russia. Detained for more than a year in a French concentration camp, Serge...

"Written over the course of four decades, Francois-René de Chateaubriand's epic autobiography has drawn the admiration of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Proust, Roland Barthes, Paul Auster, and W. G. Sebald. In this unabridged section of the Memoirs, spanning the years 1768 to 1800, Chateaubriand looks back on the already bygone world of his youth. He recounts the history of his aristocratic family and the first rumblings of the French Revolution. He recalls...

"The Orphic Voice is a book about the relationship between poetry and our place in and knowledge of the natural world written by one of the most original, distinguished, and visionary literary thinkers of the late twentieth century. Taking its bearings from the Greek myth of Orpheus, whose singing had the power to move the rocks and trees and to quiet the animals, The Orphic Voice is an exercise in what Sewell calls mythic thinking. Myth is not, she...

"The Silentiary (1964) happens in a nameless Latin-American city during the years after World War II. A young man employed in mid-level management entertains an ambition to write a book of some sort. But first he must establish the necessary preconditions. It is the second of three novels by Antonio Di Benedetto that have come to be known as the Trilogy of Expectation in allusion to the dedication of the first one, Zama (1956), 'To the victims of...

"Telluria is set in the future, when a devastating holy war between Europe and Islam has succeeded in returning the world to the torpor and disorganization of the Middle Ages. Europe, China, and Russia have all broken up. The people of the world now live in an array of little nations like puzzle pieces, each cultivating its own ideology or identity, a neo-feudal world of fads and feuds, in which no one power dominates. What does, however, travel everywhere...