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This historical novel—Visoška kronika in the Slovene original—is about two generations of the owners of the Visoko estate in the Duchy of Carniola, a predominantly Slovene province of the Habsburg Empire, in the seventeenth century. The events of the estate and the fate of its owners are affected by witchcraft persecutions, the mistreatment of Protestants, and the Thirty Years’ War. These themes are key to the construction of a Slovene national identity, which was going through a decisive phase as Tavčar was writing. By the time the novel was released in 1919, his nation had left the Habsburg Crown for the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.

The work is both romantic and realistic. The deeply romantic motive of crime, repentance, and punishment intertwines the lives of father and son. The very acquisition of the estate is connected to a murder, which casts a long shadow over the next generation. Tavčar insists on the principle of man’s full responsibility for his acts, which can be repaired with action and determination. The author’s bleak realistic description of the farm life at Visoko reflects his polemical view of the Slovene farmer of his time.

Daisy Al-Amir is one of the more visible figures in women's fiction in the Arab world today. This collection of stories, originally published in Lebanon as Ala La'ihat al-Intizar, is the most recent of her five publications. Her stories intimately reflect women's experiences in the chaotic worlds of the Lebanese civil war and the rise of Saadam Hussain as Iraq's leader. Set in Iraq, Cyprus, and Lebanon, the stories shed light on an unusual Middle East refugee experience—that of a cultural refugee, a divorced woman who is educated, affluent, and alone.

Al-Amir is also a poet and novelist, whose sensual prose grows out of a long tradition of Iraqi poetry. But one also finds existential themes in her works, as Al-Amir tries to balance what seems fated and what seems arbitrary in the turbulent world she inhabits. She deals with time and space in a minimalist, surreal style, while studying the disappointments of life through the subjective lens of memory. Honestly facing the absence of family and the instability of place, Al-Amir gives lifelike qualities to the inanimate objects of her rapidly changing world.

In addition to the stories, two examples of the author's experimental poems are included. In her introduction, Mona Mikhail places these stories and poems in the context of contemporary Islamic literature and gender studies.

The Wind Traveler showcases the mesmerizing storytelling of Alonso Cueto at the top of his career. At the heart of his latest work is a seemingly ordinary man named Ángel, who sells kitchenware at a store in Lima. In the early 1990s, he had served as an army soldier, engaging in brutal acts whose aftermath still reverberates. He is forced to reckon with his past when a woman he was instructed to kill enters the store and buys a few items. How can she still be alive? What's more, how can she not recognize Ángel? Remarkably, she asks him to deliver her purchases to her house. From this moment, Ángel feels compelled to make amends through any means necessary, even if it requires sacrificing his life of quiet retirement.

A stirring tribute to the wounded souls who yearn to make peace with the past, The Wind Traveler offers a new vision of the fragile human connections that sustain a deeply fractured world.

They Die Strangers, a novella and thirteen short stories, is the first full-length work of the distinguished Yemeni writer Mohammad Abdul-Wali to appear in English. Abdul-Wali died tragically in an aviation accident, and his stories were collected after his death by the translators Abubaker Bagader and Deborah Akers.

Abdul-Wali was born in Ethiopia of Arab Yemeni parents. His stories, filled with nostalgia and the bitterness of exile, deal with the common experiences of Yemenis like himself who are caught between cultures by the displacements of civil war or labor migration. His characters include women left behind, children raised without fathers, and men returning home after years of absence. He explores the human condition through the eyes of the oppressed and disenfranchised and is particularly sympathetic to the plight of women.

Isabella Marincola lived between two cultures. The child of an Italian military officer father and a Somali mother, she was never fully part of either culture. In Somalia, she was seen as a child of the ruling colonizers, while in Italy her darker skin made her an object of both fascination and contempt. Even as she worked as an actress and model in postwar Italy, she was valued for her exotically beautiful body, not her keen mind or her captivating voice.

Titled after Isabella’s Somali name, Timira is a unique combination of novel, archival sources, and oral history. It finally gives her a chance to articulate her experiences of being a Black Italian woman in different epochs of Italian history, from Fascism to the 1990s, in all of which italianità was assumed to be exclusively white. 

Cowritten by her son Antar Mohamed Marincola and a founding member of the Wu Ming writers’ collective, it is based on a series of writings and interviews Isabella gave towards the end of her long, eventful life. A compelling novel rooted in truth, Timira reflects on Italy’s colonial legacy and ingrained racism, while telling the story of a courageous woman and her struggles to assert herself in a nation unprepared to accommodate its Black citizens.