Written in the early 1930's and prefiguring the ethnic horrors of World War II, Franz Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh remains the only significant treatment, fiction or nonfiction, in any literature, of the first in the twentieth century's long series of holy wars and lamentable inhumanities.

"Life is an unclassified masterpiece, a sprawling compendium as encyclopedic as Dante's Commedia and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and, in its break with tradition, as inspiring as Joyce's Ulysses. Structured around a single moment in time - 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975 - Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, and extraordinary rich...

The occupation of Holland during World War II as seen by a young German journalist. The sight of Jews being deported shocks Andreas. He offers his services to the Dutch resistance, hides Jews, becomes friends with a Jew who is subsequently deported and marries his cousin.

A collection featuring novellas by prominent Israeli writers. They range from Aharon Appelfeld's In the Isles of St. George, which is on a wandering blackmarketeer, to David Grossman's Yani on the Mountain, on the social cost of Israel's militarization.

An amnesiac searches for his identity, from Polynesia to Rome, in this novel by the Nobel Prize–winning author of Dora Bruder. Guy Roland is in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation. For ten years, he has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a onetime client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files-directories,...