Hailed as a ‘nonfiction epic . . . in the tradition of Jared Diamond’s best-seller Collapse, and Simon Winchester’s Atlantic’ (Dallas Morning News), Jack E. Davis’s The Gulf is ‘by turns informative, lyrical, inspiring and chilling for anyone who cares about the future of ‘America’s Sea’ ‘ (Wall Street Journal). Illuminating America’s political and economic relationship with the environment...

Perfectly titled, Vertigo -W.G. Sebald's marvelous first novel - is a work that teeters on the edge: compelling, puzzling, and deeply unsettling. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, journeys across Europe to Vienna, Venice, Verona, Riva, and finally to his childhood home in a small Bavarian village. He is also journeying into the past. Traveling in the footsteps of Stendhal,...

A mondegreen is something that is heard improperly by someone who then clings to that misinterpretation as fact. Fittingly, Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s novel Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love explores the ways that memory and language construct our identity, and how we hold on to it no matter what. The novel tells the story of Haba Habinsky, a refugee from Ukraine’s Donbas region, who has...

An immediate sensation when it was published in 1929, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front has sold more than twenty million copies worldwide since then, making it the best-selling German novel of all time. Its impact is indisputable: it has been adapted for film, television, and other media; has influenced all subsequent works of war literature; and has been taught in high...

Gorgeously translated by Lydia Davis, the miniature stories of A. L. Snijders might concern a lost shoe, a visit with a bat, fears of travel, a dream of a man who has lost a glass eye: uniting them is their concision and their vivacity. Lydia Davis in her introduction delves into her fascination with the pleasures and challenges of translating from a language relatively new to her. She also...

Earth Gods presents the early writings of Taras Prokhasko, one of Ukraine’s most prominent contemporary writers. Collected here for the first time in one book, these works span various genres yet form a single chronicle. Anna’s Other Days, Prokhasko’s first publication, testifies to the desire to free Ukrainian culture of overt influences of voices, styles, and genres that have dominated it for...

‘My father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.’ A man named Georgi sits patiently by his father’s bedside, until a final winter morning. Navigating a season of grief, Georgi parses through the endless stories his father used to tell, and the history of his whole generation-boys born in Bulgaria at the end of the World War II, grown into men ‘often absent-clinging to the snorkel of a cigarette,’...

In the autumn of 1965, flush with the unexpected success of his first published books, the Czech author Bohumil Hrabal bought a cottage in Kersko. From then until his death in 1997, he divided his time between Prague and his country retreat, where he wrote and tended to a community of feral cats. Over the years, his relationship to cats grew deeper and more complex, becoming a measure of the...