In Auschwitz, memory meant life: remembering the humanity extinguished by the death camps and hoping to survive to tell what had been endured. Charlotte Delbo, a non-Jew sent to Auschwitz for being a
"Traduced by malice, persecuted by fiction, abandoned by false patrons, and overwhelmed by the sense of a domestic calamity," Tobias Smollett set off on a journey through France and Italy to relieve h
Considered a masterpiece of travel literature for nearly a century, The Sea and the Jungle is a wise and witty book of firsts: ostensibly a light-hearted story of a Londoner's first ocean voyage, it i
Arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Dachau, Robert Antelme recovered his freedom a year later when Francois Mitterand, visiting the camp in an official capacity, recognized the dying Antelme and h
Murder, lust, shame, hypocrisy, and suicide are at the center of The Guiltless, Hermann Broch's postwar novel about the disintegration of European society in the decades preceding the Second World War
Tönle Bintarn's story takes place in the Veneto region, which once bordered the Austro-Hungarian Empire and where smuggling provided a means of subsistence to the peasants. Having run afoul of re
This fine novel, Flaiano's only full-length work of fiction, was published under the title Tempo di uccidere in 1947 and won that year's Strega Prize. Translated into English it appeared as The Short
"Beyond the completion of a 3,000-mile journey, mostly under amusing conditions, through a little-known part of the world, and the discovery of one new tributary to a tributary to a tributary of the A
Paris in the 1930s: Louis Grandeville has a beautiful wife, a nice home, a loyal servant, and a large circle of well-placed friends. His financial situation doesn't require him to work. Yet Louis is o
Mario Rigoni Stern was barely twenty-one and already a battle veteran at the time of the World War II disaster he describes in The Sergeant in the Snow. In July 1942 three divisions of Italian Alpini
In the fall of 1928, Freya Stark, a thirty-five-year-old Englishwoman, set out on her first journey to the Middle East. Bolstered by a command of Arabic, a fair knowledge of Farsi, and an irrepressib
This novel begins with a funeral for a young mother:A good-looking girl, anyway, who with that coif of hers got to look rather like a nun as the years passed, and whom few of us were content to see ly
La pell de brau has been called the most important book to appear in Spain in the 1960s. Grappling with themes of national, racial, and cultural identity, its frankness exhilarated and inspired the yo
Pursuing and expanding the concept of the "novelized essay" that had served him so well in Navigator of the Flood, his first venture into writing, Brelich here takes up the biblical story of Abraham a
