In 2014, a well-trained, mysterious band of mercenaries arrived in Ukraine, part of Russia's first attempt to claim the country as its own. Upon ceasefire, the ‘Wagner Group’ faded back into shadow, only to reemerge in the Middle East, where they'd go toe-to-toe with the U.S., and in Africa, where they'd earn praise for ‘tough measures’ against insurgencies yet spark outrage for looting,...

Tadeusz Borowski’s concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket or the luxury...

In Intent to Destroy, political scientist Eugene Finkel uncovers these deep roots of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Ukraine is a key borderland between Russia and the West, and, following the rise of Russian nationalism in the nineteenth century, dominating Ukraine became the cornerstone of Russian policy. Russia has long used genocidal tactics—killings, deportations, starvation, and cultural...

As the frequency of air-raid sirens sending an apartment building’s residents to the basement increases, the neighbor children block out reality with the toys at hand—some imported from Western Europe and North America, others regional knockoffs or questionably improvised. Maša Kolanovic’s Underground Barbie brilliantly captures the vagaries of childhood as innocence gives way to the horrors of...

Anna Akhmatova was born near Odesa in 1889. Christened as Anna Gorenko, she adopted her penname from the family of her mother. She attended school in Tsarskoe Selo and lived most of her life in Saint Petersburg, the city with which so much of her poetry is intimately connected. She frequented the Tower, the famous literary salon of the symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, and in 1910 she married...

This novel is a testament of what seemed at the time a fairly ordinary childhood, in the bosom of a normal Nazi family in Landsberg.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Victoria Amelina was busy writing a novel, taking part in the country’s literary scene, and parenting her son. Now she became someone new: a war crimes researcher and the chronicler of extraordinary women like herself who joined the resistance. These heroines include Evgenia, a prominent lawyer turned soldier, Oleksandra, who documented tens of...

Entering its 15th year of English translation, the brilliant Hans Fallada's account of what The New Yorker called ‘a visceral, chilling portrait of … everyday German life during the war’ follows a working-class couple in Berlin and grieving the loss of their son, launch a campaign to oppose the Nazi regime. Based on a true story from the files of the Gestapo, this sweeping saga of resistance is...

First published in 1934, Goodbye to Berlin has been popularized on stage and screen by Julie Harris in I Am a Camera and Liza Minelli in Cabaret. Isherwood magnificently captures 1931 Berlin: charming, with its avenues and cafés; marvelously grotesque, with its nightlife and dreamers; dangerous, with its vice and intrigue; powerful and seedy, with its mobs and millionaires - this was the period...

The Canadian North is a vast and lonely land where bears roam free, fires rage unchecked, and storms blast every living thing on the tundra. When Stephan Kesting, already no stranger to pushing his own physical limits, was faced with a rare illness, he knew the only way for him to recover in both body and mind was to dig even deeper. Despite the dangers inherent in the sub-arctic, Kesting sets...

It is 1919, and the Great War that has ravaged Europe is over. In Italy, the people are exhausted. Tired of the political class. Tired of vague promises, inept moderates, and the agonizing machinations of a democracy that has failed ordinary citizens. While elite leaders have sat idly by, achieving nothing, one outsider—the director of a small opposition newspaper and a tireless political...

There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. Slavoj Žižek has identified the 4 horsemen of this coming apocalypse: the worldwide ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; the biogenetic revolution; and exploding social divisions and ruptures. But if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it...