Known as the ‘Wizard of the Kremlin,’ the enigmatic Vadim Baranov was a TV producer before becoming a political advisor to Putin, aka ‘The Czar.’ After his resignation from this position, legends about him multiply, with no one able to distinguish truth from fiction. Until one night, when he tells his story to the narrator of this book…

A dazzling debut novel about a young woman's vexed coming of age in a traditional Azerbaijani community in Russia, grappling under the weight of Muslim patriarchal norms and a debilitating neurological condition. The mysterious affliction leaves her unable to control her muscles, plagued by pain and speech disorders, defying diagnosis. Addressing each body part with the scrupulousness of a...

József Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian-language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944; had he been selected to go left, his life expectancy would have been approximately forty-five minutes. One of the ‘lucky’ ones, he was sent to the right, which led to twelve horrifying months of incarceration and slave labor in a series of camps, ending in the ‘Cold Crematorium’-the so-called...

Loosely based on the little-known 1859 Mexican invasion of the United States, Texas: The Great Theft is a richly imagined evocation of the volatile Tex-Mex borderland. Boullosa views border history through a new lens decentering US narratives, and her sympathetic portrayal of each of her wildly diverse characters—Mexican ranchers and Texas Rangers, Comanches and cowboys, German socialists and...

After a young couple return from their summer in the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine, they discover that the world as they once knew it no longer exists. Survivors are forced to adapt to the harsh conditions of their new reality: a place where erosion floats in on a breeze, and ceasing to exist comes with a deceptively joyous capitulation. Overcoming deeply rooted fears, they try to forge...

When Maya, a young Russian filmmaker, makes a low-budget horror movie with her friends, it seems like a promising start to a career in indie film. Little does she know that her jokey lo-fi film will soon attract the attention of the autocratic censors at the highest levels of the Russian police state. What follows is a propulsive narrative of an artist being crushed by state power, and the...

Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, is one day assigned to write a routine German lesson on the ‘The Joys of Duty.’ Overfamiliar with these ‘joys,’ Siggi sets down his life since 1943, a decade earlier, when as a boy he watched his father, constable of the northernmost police station in Germany, doggedly carry out orders from Berlin to stop a well-known Expressionist, their...

In the United States, democracy is under attack by an authoritarian movement that has found fertile ground among the country’s conservative politicians and voters, but similar movements have found homes in the hearts and minds of people around the globe. To understand the shape, form, and stakes of this assault, we must go back to extract lessons from our past.

In these stories, Dostoevsky explores both the figure of the dreamer divorced from reality, and also his own ambiguous attitude toward utopianism, themes central to his great novels. In White Nights, the apparent idyll of the dreamer's romantic fantasies disguises profound loneliness and estrangement from living life. A Gentle Creature and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man show how withdrawal from...