Riven by the tension between hagiographies, utopias, belief, longing, and grief, the poems of My Heresies catalog a personal and familial history originating in Bucharest, Romania and landing in Birmingham, Alabama. Whether through sardonic takes on old Bible myths or homage paid to French-Romanian poet Paul Celan, Stefanescu's poems are laden in subtext, in imagery sometimes abstract and lush,...

The Culture of Lies is one of the most intelligent and lucid accounts of an appalling episode in history. It shows us the banality and brutality of nationalism and the way that nationalistic ideology permeates every pore of life. Ugrešic's acerbic and penetrating essays cover everything from politics to daily routine, from public to private life. With a diverse and unusual perspective, she...

Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin-like figure, Baron Béla Wenckheim, who returns at the end of his life to his provincial Hungarian hometown. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he longs to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. Confusions abound, and what follows is an...

Eight stories, eight women, an emotional multitude. In her short-story collection, Birthday, Jana Egle distinctly straps the male presence into the back seat and lets the female voice ring free. Not to be taken as ‘a book for women’ or ‘women's literature,’ the themes and situations in Birthday present a familiar, yet uneasy, vantage point for any reader, regardless of personal, real-life...

The Queen of Spades; The Tales of Belkin; Peter the Great's Blackamoor; The Captain's Daughter.

Day after day the Russian asylum-seekers sit across from the interpreter and Peter--the Swiss officers who guard the gates to paradise--and tell of the atrocities they've suffered, or that they've invented, or heard from someone else. These stories of escape, war, and violence intermingle with the interpreter's own reading: a his-tory of an ancient Persian war; letters sent to his son...