Josep Pla (1897-1981), one of the most influential and controversial Catalan authors of the twentieth century, has a sensibility he declared to have been “notoriously influenced” by his admiration for the Dutch genre painters. In... Read More

Parisian bookseller Laurent Letellier, on his way to enjoy a double espresso and study his notes for an upcoming book signing, discovers a mauve leather handbag, in excellent condition and obviously not empty, sitting upon a waste bin... Read More

When Hélène Chambon, great-niece of author Daniel Roche, pen name H. R. Sanders, moves to Paris to study archeology, she encounters a mystery much more engrossing than her studies—one that not only involves her enigmatic, eccentric,... Read More

Sultry, seductive Alexandria is filled with secrets, seething resentments, and hidden tensions, and the Egyptian Jews who live there, though enamored of the city’s charms, are coming to see that their lives are precariously balanced... Read More

Tiny San Nidro, nestled between forest and sea in southern Italy’s Puglia region, is a forgotten place, locked in the past and graced with wild beauty. Many of its young people have left to seek their fortunes elsewhere; the few... Read More

The mythical Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull creature condemned to wander a labyrinth until killed, serves as an organizing image for Georgi Gospodinov’s time-traveling, labyrinthine stories about himself and his family—tales of... Read More

In July of 1923, Franz Kafka, forty years old, is ill with tuberculosis and convalescing near the Baltic Sea, when he meets twenty-five-year-old Dora Diamant, a remarkable woman fifteen years his junior who seems to him the essence of... Read More

In 1847, Taos, New Mexico, in the parched hinterland of the nation’s newest territory, was about as remote as it got in America. It was not, however, an unlikely location for a revolt against America’s heavy-handed takeover of what... Read More