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European literature
Summer Reading List for High Schoolers: 16 Books Worth Your Time
Most high school summer reading lists are the same list, mostly American, mostly the same handful of authors. This one is built differently: 16 books from Senegal to Soviet Russia to Mexico, organized by grade level, that make the world feel larger.
Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky or the First Anti-Hero
A nameless, spiteful man speaks to us from a cellar in Petersburg, and insists on a freedom so absolute that he will choose his own suffering rather than let reason dictate his happiness. Dostoevsky's short, savage confession is where the modern anti-hero is born, and where existentialism first finds its voice, decades before it had a name.
Best Contemporary French Novels in English Translation
France treats the novel as a second parliament, a place where the questions that matter are put to the vote of the imagination. This running list gathers the finest contemporary French novels now in English, from newly crowned Goncourt and Renaudot winners to the modern masters of art, memory, and the vanishing countryside.
The Use of Man by Aleksandar Tišma: War as the Machine That Uses Everyone
A woman buys a notebook to keep a diary, and that fragile thing outlives nearly everyone it touches. In The Use of Man, Aleksandar Tišma turns the Second World War into a machine whose true horror is not death but use, the slow conversion of people into instruments. This is the great Novi Sad novel of survival, and of the wounds that survival cannot heal.