A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before....

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...

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...

In March of 2022, three weeks after invading Ukraine, Russian forces bombed the shelter housed in the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater, in the city of Mariupol. The bombing stands, to this day, as the single worst act of mass civilian killing of the war. This book tells the story of the group of ordinary Ukrainians--workers, teachers, actors--who built that shelter, giving succor to...

A searing portrayal of Vienna’s bourgeoisie, it begins with the arrival of an unnamed writer at an ‘artistic dinner’ hosted by a composer and his society wife—a couple he once admired and has come to loathe. The guest of honor, a distinguished actor from the Burgtheater, is late. As the other guests wait impatiently, they are seen through the critical eye of the writer, who narrates a silent...

Aschenbach has always lived a life of structured routine, but he has begun to be troubled by diminishing creative inspiration from his strict writing schedule. While walking in a cemetery north of Munich, he has a dizzying vision which prompts him to abandon his settled life and travel south to Venice. On checking into his hotel, Aschenbach notices a young Polish boy of perfect, sculptural...