Jonas Wergeland is on trial, accused of murdering his wife. The most beloved and celebrated television personality in Norway, Wergeland’s programs on the history of Norway held the country in his thrall. Now the spectacle of his trial has done the same.

This series of thought-provoking and incisive essays from Dubravka Ugresic explores the full spectrum of human existence. From life in exile to life in prison, from bottled-water drinking tourists with massive backpacks to the Eurovision song contest, Ugresic's unfailingly sharp critical eye never fails to reveal what has been hidden in plain sight by routine, or uncover the tragic, and the comic, in the everyday.

An alternately dark and hilarious novel of cowardice, comeuppance, and assumed identity from the bassist of The Sugarcubes, The Pets tells the story of Emil, who lies trapped under his bed while his apparently imbalanced former roommate throws a party in his living room.

First published in 1952, this early novel of Duras's—which was made into a film in 1967—shows those preoccupations which have so deeply concerned her in her later novels and film scripts: loneliness, boredom, the inevitability and intangibility of love. The lambent poetry of the book, and the limning of a woman's mind, her love and sense of the inevitability of that love are singularly Marguerite Duras.

Most widely admired for his short fiction, The Taker and Other Stories is Fonseca's first collection to appear in English translation, and it ranges across his oeuvre, exploring the sights and sounds of the modern landscape of Rio de Janeiro. In the stories of The Taker, rich and poor live in an uneasy equilibrium, where only overwhelming force can maintain order, and violence and deception are essential tools of survival.

A survivor of the labor camps, Vytautas Vargalys is a physically and mentally damaged man obsessed with finding out what’s "really going on" in Soviet-ruled Vilnius. He’s stuck working an absurd job—creating a digital catalog for a library that no one is allowed to access—but finds meaning by tracking all of the so-called clues about "them" that he uncovers wherever he looks: in books, in the death of his best friend, and in the beautiful women sent to work at the library.