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...

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.

The Argentinean tango…a dance of passion and sensuality? A dance of passion and danger! A dance, which led a young ballerina into the embrace of a mysterious man, and opened the door for her into the captivating, exotic world of Argentinean bohemia… But suddenly her loved one disappears without a trace, and she sets off on searches for him. Searches which become more and more dangerous….

This book is the author's full version of the famous documentary novel 'Babi Yar' about the extermination of the Jewish population of Kiev in the autumn of 1941. Anatoly Kuznetsov, then a teenager, himself witnessed the executions of Kiev Jews, communicated a lot with people who survived the catastrophe, collected memories of other contemporaries and eyewitnesses. His novel was first...

'June' by Dmitry Bykov is, as always, a vivid experiment. Three different stories are united by time and place. The end of the thirties and the middle of 1941. IFLI students, returning from exile, a mad philologist who thinks he has found a way to influence major decisions in the country through text. There is a premonition of war in the air, which the heroes of the novel both fear and rush....

The art of love is never a science

From charity to deceit, benevolence to violence, fear of God to extreme cruelty, the dictator of The Autumn of the Patriarch embodies the best and the worst of human nature. Gabriel García Márquez, the renowned master of magical realism, vividly portrays the dying tyrant caught in the prison of his own dictator-ship. Employing an innovative, dreamlike style, and overflowing with symbolic...

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...

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...

Die Schuhverkäuferin Elisabeth ist eine überzeugte Nationalsozialistin, und als sie am 1. Mai den SA-Mann Erwin kennen lernt, scheint zunächst das Glück perfekt. Doch dann wird Elisabeth schwanger, und Erwin rät ihr zur Abtreibung. Auch in politischer Hinsicht entfremden sich die beiden zunehmend, denn Elisabeth wird in ein Arbeitslager geschickt und beginnt dort das System zu hinterfragen....