Hlasko’s writing combines brutal realism with smoky, hardboiled dialogue in a bleak world where violence is the norm and love is often an act.
A Long Day’s Evening revolves around the relationship between two eighth-century monks. Through these main characters, Karasu explores the nature of duality.
They Were Counted, the first part of the trilogy, paints an unrivalled portrait of the vanished world of pre-1914 Hungary, as seen through the eyes of two young Transylvanian cousins, Count Balint…
‘The dog adopted the Ancsas in the spring of 1948’. So the story begins. The Ancsas are a middle-aged couple living on the outskirts of Budapest in a ruinous Hungary that is just…
Posthumously published in 1967, Hänen olivat linnut (literally: His Were the Birds) is regarded as a masterpiece of modern Finnish novel. The novel centres around the question how a human being is…
Tip Marugg was the hermit of Curaçao, an island in the Netherlands Antilles, and the author of a small body of exceptionally fine literary work. His novels show the touch of a master stylist who…
On a night in July, at the age of sixty, Adelheid Duvanel froze to death in a forest. But it is not just the manner of her death that is reminiscent of Robert Walser. The wholehearted naiveté of her…
Those who met Ferdinand Bordewijk described him as an impeccable yet nondescript lawyer. Even the few acquaintances he deigned to meet privately found it almost impossible to extract personal…
In his books Frank Martinus Arion tries to provide readers with ‘critical knowledge about reality’, while at the same time getting them ‘so immersed in the book that they forget about the food…
Like his compatriot Primo Levi, the Italian writer Mario Rigoni Stern, who has died aged 86, was the author of a much-admired bestselling memoir about his grim experiences during the Second World…
Long after Arthur’s last battle, Merlin and Guinevere live on. They retire to their house in Miranda, in the province of Galicia - though retire is hardly the word. Representatives of Europe’s…
Although written under the masculine pseudonym Victor Català, this work by Caterina Albert undoubtedly constitutes the starting point of the exploration of female identity by female writers in…
An exceptional collection of stories about a magical childhood during the Nazi occupation. One of Czech literature’s best-loved classics.
Tommaso Landolfi has the reputation of being a “writer’s writer,” most of whose novels and short stories are out of print despite the high praise of authors as distinguished as…
In an imagined Lithuania where if it is not raining, it is probably snowing, a very odd family resides in a Neo-Gothic chateau surrounded by an overgrowth of trees, vines, and general miasmic…
Henrik Tikkanen wrote a series of novellas about a single family, members of the small Finnish-Swedish elite that used to dominate Finland’s financial, political and cultural life. With the…
Stratis Myrivilis’ masterwork Life in the Tomb presents the personal experience of war with precision, respect and exasperation, in a voice that is both introspectively poetic and harsh.…
On the Edge of Reason reveals the fundamental chasm between conformity and individuality. As folly piles on folly, hypocrisy on hypocrisy, reason itself begins to give way, and the edge between…
“I recommend this book to the reader because it is massive, impressive, and grimly amusing. I cannot promise the reader that at any point he will shake his sides with laughter, but I can promise…
For a boy growing up in a quarrying village in north-west Wales in the early twentieth century, life can be full of adventure and comedy, but never without a dark side. In this thinly-disguised…
Axel Jensen’s Epp (1965) is a darkly dystopian book about a pensioner called Epp, who is living in a town on an unnamed planet in a big block surrounded by hundreds of similar blocks. The society…
Dos Bukh fun Gan-Eden is a satirical fantasy set in Paradise – a humorous vision of the afterlife in which familiar human weaknesses and pains persist. In the book Yiddish culture with its…
Emyr Humphreys’s seventh published novel, originally completed in 1942, was (in its first draft) his earliest novelistic writing. Revised and rewritten in Welsh, it was broadcast as a radio play by…
A consummate stylist, Maria Dermoût is renowned for leaving her readers with final sentences that resonate with hope and consolation. She invests her characters with strength and self-awareness, in…
“Niels Lyhne,” Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess in 1895, “has moved me more profoundly than any other reading of the last ten years; the last chapters I recognize as classic.” …
Chronicles of the Hidden Truth is a collection of thirty-one short stories renowned for their unusual imaginative twists, the originality of their humor, and the gentle irony of their commentary on…
Mirdja is a book about feminity and the search for a female identity at the beginning of the twentieth century. The protagonist assumes the role of a femme fatale, as it is the only way to achieve…
The epistolary novel would seem a very worthy, classic genre, but in Postal Deviations Kazimierz Brandys has managed to get a great deal out of this formula, giving us a novel that is thoroughly…
Rabies is a vision of the end of the world, or at least the end of what we, in our anthropocentric vanity, take for the world. The novel depicts a microbiological catastrophe that occurs because of a…
A childhood in poverty, misery and cynicism; a search for friendship and a trust that is always broken. The powerlessness of children left on their own, exposed to the brutality of adults: all of…
Which neglected masterpiece should Schwob cover next?
