In the title story of Diabelli – a collection of short fiction by the Swiss writer Hermann Burger (1942–89), first published in 1979 – a washed-up prestidigitator describes the linguistic traits ...

440pp. Princeton University Press. £35 (US $39.95). Stephanie Sandler “The plot always thickens in winter / All roads lead right to it”, says a voice in Maria Stepanova’s book-length poem Holy Winter ...

The TLS - Toby Lichtig travels to Oslo to interview the Nobel laureate Jon Fosse; Natasha Lehrer heads to Zurich for a compelling new play by Deborah Levy.

To return or not to return? That is the question that has defined the long-running debate around the sculptures made almost 2,500 years ago to adorn the buildings of the Acropolis of Athens. They tend ...

The French mythic-realist Jean Giono was born in 1895 in the small Provençal town of Manosque, and his novels, stories, plays and poems survey this dry, mountainous landscape in all its vicious, ...

A cyclist accusing a driver of getting too close. A quarrel with a man spreading his legs open across two seats of a bus. Kyoto begins with a montage of volatility ripped from the mobile screens of ...

Central Europe has seldom been short of dissidents. Their names are celebrated in its crowded pantheons of national heroes: defenders of religious freedom, peasant tribunes, revolutionary Jacobins, ...

The Reformation scholar Patrick Collinson once noted that “no-one has dared write a biography of [Robert] Beale”. There were good reasons. Second-tier administrators rarely make exciting biographical ...

Wayne McGregor, a resident choreographer at the Royal Ballet, is no stranger to transforming literature into movement: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves inspired his three-act ...

Leo Tolstoy hoped to finish Anna Karenina quickly. Within a year of beginning the novel in early 1873, he was already looking forward to its rapid publication in book form. The entire “carcass” of ...

and walk the city with multimillioned windows for eyes. Versions of the world and time are limned through screens over-pinging with messages. cats curled under fenceposts, the lampposts’ travelogues ...

It is December 25, 1975. Maria Gabriela Llansol writes in her diary of meditation, chickens, her dog, of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Daybreak and the journal kept by the religious historian Mircea Eliade, ...