Tough customers: drunks, crazies, and other cherished branches of the family tree

The poet Joseph Brodsky, kicked out of the USSR and never fully at ease writing in English, was a man of many residences and few homes, as a new biography shows

Jews and Germans, ghosts and golems, comedians and clowns

With her debut novel, The Cosmopolitans, Nadia Kalman expands the boundaries of Soviet-Jewish immigrant fiction

Aberrant Marxist, heretical Jew, maverick social theorist—Walter Benjamin remains difficult to classify, but his mystique only continues to grow

In the poems of Silver Roses, the late Rachel Wetzsteon—who took her own life last year—is still very much alive

Women and work, women and prayer: from ancient Rome to contemporary Brooklyn

A biography explores Claude Lévi-Strauss’ fascination with what makes cultures tick

Books that instruct, books that edify

It is no accident that Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex while having an affair with Jewish novelist Nelson Algren

A collection of Vasily Grossman’s shorter work offers a chance to reassess the Soviet master’s life and legacy. A conversation with Grossman translator Robert Chandler.

The new Words Without Borders anthology of writing from the Middle East is marred by a key omission