A term of physiology and neurology, algometry is the science of measuring pain. However, it is not physical pain that Iryna Vikyrchak examines in Algometry, but her experiences growing up in Western Ukraine in the ’90s, emphasizing emotional sensitivity and inner strength, which give way to a philosophical and lyrical reflection on pain, suffering, and empathy as a measurement of our humanness....

Memory Burn, is a coming-of-age story of a queer boy from a Czech industrial town. Torcík’ delves into the recesses of memory in an effort to come to terms with painful memories from his childhood. As a homosexual boy with a slight build growing up in a small industrial town, the protagonist of the story faces severe bullying at school, but his problems aren’t over once he gets home: his...

The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel, one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday world of a unique...

From the moment they met in 1940 in Ravensbrück concentration camp, Milena Jesenska and Margarete Buber-Neumann were inseparable. Czech Milena was Kafka’s first translator and epistolary lover, and a journalist opposed to fascism. A non-conformist, bi-sexual feminist, she was way ahead of her time. With the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, her home became a central meeting place for Jewish...

To many, German food is humble comfort food, the kind of food that may not win a beauty award, but more than makes up for it with its power to soothe, nourish and cheer. In Classic German Cooking, Luisa Weiss—who was born in Berlin to an Italian mother and American father, and married into a family with roots in Saxony—has collected and mastered the essential everyday recipes of Germany and...

How would you communicate the realities of living in a warzone to someone who has never had this experience? Thirty Ukrainian women, ages 10 to 72, answered this question in letters that emanate power, depth, pain, strength, and resilience. These fragments of life reveal the horrors of conflict but also the humanity of survivors.

Why did the Holocaust happen in Germany, of all places? How did a country known for its culture and refinement turn so rabidly anti-Semitic? Why did a nation where Jews had full civil rights and many opportunities-a place that Jews had eagerly flocked to in the early twentieth century to escape racist persecution in Poland and Russia-turn upon them so violently just a few decades later?...

In this groundbreaking book, historian Götz Aly addresses one of modern history's greatest conundrums: How did Hitler win the allegiance of ordinary Germans? The answer is as shocking as it is persuasive: by engaging in a campaign of theft on an almost unimaginable scale-and by channeling the proceeds into generous social programs-Hitler literally bought his people's consent.