Nearly one hundred years after Franz Kafka’s death, his works continue to intrigue and haunt us. Kafka is regarded as one of the most significant intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth century, and even for those who are only barely acquainted with his novels, stories, diaries, or letters, “Kafkaesque” has become a term synonymous with the menacing, unfathomable absurdity of modern existence and bureaucracy. While the significance of his fiction is wide-reaching, Kafka’s writing remains inextricably bound up with his life and work in a particular place: Prague. It is here that the author spent every one of his forty years.

Drawing from a range of documents and historical materials, this is the first book specifically dedicated to the relationship between Kafka and Prague. Klaus Wagenbach’s account of Kafka’s life in the city is a meticulously researched insight into the author’s family background, his education and employment, his attitude toward the town of his birth, his literary influences, and his relationships with women. The result is a fascinating portrait of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic writer and the city that provided him with so much inspiration. W. G. Sebald recognized that “literary and life experience overlap” in Kafka’s works, and the same is true of this book.
 

A crumbling marriage. An ancient mystery. And a way to change the past . . . 

When archaeologist Aaron Keeler finds himself transported eighteen years backward in time, he becomes swept up in a strangely illicit liaison with his younger wife. A brilliant musician, Violet is captivated by the attentive, “weathered” version of her husband. The Aaron she recently married—an American expat—has become distant, absorbed by his excavation of a prehistoric site at Kilmartin Glen on Scotland’s west coast, where he will soon make the discovery that launches his career. As Aaron travels back and forth across the span of nearly two decades, with time passing in both worlds, he faces a threat to his revelatory dig, a crisis with the older Violet—mother of his two young children—and a sudden deterioration of his health. Meanwhile, Violet’s musical performances take on a resonance related to the secrets the two are uncovering in both time frames. With their children and Aaron’s lives at risk, he and Violet try to repair the damage before it’s too late.

Once again, Tom Lutz takes us to seldom-traveled corners of the world—the small towns of western Madagascar, the terraced rice fields in northern Luzon, the scattered homesteads on the Mongolian steppe, the hilltop churches on Micronesian islands, the riverside docks of Dhaka, Ethiopian weddings in Gondar, funeral pyres in Nepal, traditionalist karaoke bars in Bhutan—to bring us random reports of human kindness.

You may never visit these places, but Tom Lutz will do it for you. And while global media may serve up a steady diet of division, violence, oppression, hatred, and strife, The Kindness of Strangers shows that people the world over are much more likely to meet strangers with interest, empathy, welcome, and compassion.
 

A powerful debut novel about war, immigration, and home

Celebrating the power of literature to rescue a life from despair, Koan Khmer is the story of Samnang Sok, an orphaned child survivor of the Cambodian genocide who sets out to make a new life in America alongside his extended family. Struggling to cope with the traumas of his past, Samnang feels alienated from his American peers at school and disconnected from his aunts, uncles, and cousins at home. Inspired by the books he discovers along the way, Samnang begins piecing together information about the past through stories told by elders, family photographs, and his own memories and dreams. Based loosely on Tuon’s life, the novel traces Samnang’s difficult journey toward an answer to the question, How does one rebuild a life after genocide and displacement and create a home?

Koan Khmer gives an unflinching voice to a distinctly Cambodian American sensibility. Tuon creates a refugee space that all Americans can visit in this bildungsroman that breathes life into cultural knowledge disrupted by loss and grief.