The Little House is set in the early years of the Showa era (1926-89), when Japan's situation is becoming increasingly tense but has not yet fully immersed in a wartime footing. On the outskirts of Tokyo, near a station on a private train line, stands a modest European style house with a red, triangular shaped roof. There a woman named Taki has ......
In Bociany, Rosenfarb offers completely absorbing portrayals of Jews and Christians from several walks of life in the shtetl. Her primary characters are the scribe's widow Hindele, her son Yacov, the chalk vendor Yossele Abedale, and his daughter Binele. Jewish relations with neighboring Catholics are generally civil, if complicated. Despite ......
A young woman goes on a perilous journey in search of her absent father. What ensues is a Freudian adult fairytale in this exciting debut by young Swiss author Michelle Steinbeck.
April 1917, Book 1, captures the division and helplessness of Russia's first Revolutionary rulers, paving the way for the victory of the ruthless Bolsheviks later that year. One of the masterpieces of world literature, The Red Wheel is Nobel prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's multivolume epic work about the Russian Revolution told in the form ......
Celebrated Iranian novelist Ghazeleh Alizadeh's The House of the Edrisis is a novel deeply rooted in historical and cultural significance inviting readers into a world of revolution, power, and societal transformation. The story revolves around a once-affluent aristocratic family and their majestic house, a decaying and melancholy backdrop for the ......
Walid Masoud disappears. A Palestinian intellectual, he has been living in Baghdad since the first Israeli War of 1948. As a member of an organization engaged in the armed struggle against Israel, suspicion arises that he has gone underground as part of a political movement. Masoud leaves behind a lengthy but disconnected tape recording of garbled ......
This extraordinary novel is part of Grigory Kanovich's "Litvak saga," his tribute to Jewish life before the Holocaust. Set in a small Lithuanian town in the late nineteenth century, the story begins with the arrival of a stranger who sets everyone on edge and seems to know their secrets. Is he a messenger from God, a long-lost son, a saint, or a ......
Set in the Syrian neighborhood of al-Qaweyq, Sour Grapes is a collection of fifty-nine wry, satirical short stories loosely connected by a cast of rotating characters living at society's margins. Tamer captures their everyday lives, weaving the attendant cruelties and ironies of living under an oppressive regime with the residents' irreverence and ......
Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature Originally published in 1977, Do What They Say or Else is the second novel by French author Annie Ernaux. Set in a small town in Normandy, France, the novel tells the story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Anne, who lives with her working-class parents. The story, which takes place during the summer ......
