In 1959, when Eva Hoffman was just 13 years old, her family decided to turn their back on the prevalent anti-Semitism in Poland and...

It is late summer in Vermont in the 1980s and Richard Papen has just moved to the East Coast from California to study at the liberal arts...

What does it mean to have to change your name for your classmates to be able to pronounce and remember it? How does it feel to be...

The family Gifty remembers from early childhood is a family of four, that quickly became a family of three and way too soon was cut into...

Our Bodies, Their Battlefields is a brutal, shocking, devastating read. And it could not be any other way. Christina Lamb, co-author of I...

Moll Gladney is a quiet girl, not known to cause troubles to her devout and hardworking parents. But one night she disappears from her...

Frederic Henry, known simply as “tenente” by most, is an American lieutenant fighting with the Italian Army in World War I. He meets the...

“We may be intolerant even in advocating the cause of Toleration, and so bent on making proselytes to free-thinking as to allow no one to...

(english version below) Famiglia di Natalia Ginzburg contiene due novelle sulla vita della borghesia romana nella seconda metà del secolo...

Desiree and Stella Vignes are identical and inseparable. Only those who know them well will be able to tell them apart: Desiree, the...

The social laws of high school dynamics govern Connell and Marianne’s behaviour. He is the popular star of the school’s football team,...

The term intersectional feminism was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to highlight how different dimensions of oppression – for example sexism...

Grand Union is Zadie Smith’s collection of short stories, comprising eleven completely new works as well as eight stories previously...

Moscow, 1922. Count Alexander Rostov – member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt – faces a Bolshevik tribunal and the end to life as...

In face of the recent war in Israel and Palestine (and the outbreak of sharing other people’s 240-character opinions on social media), I...

Heute ist sie fast in Vergessenheit geraten, doch einst war Maeve Brennan gefeierte Autorin und Ikone der New Yorker Modewelt. Die schöne...

Frank and April Wheeler’s life in the suburbs of Connecticut might look very typical to the untrained eye: two children and a charming...

Five letters that will never reach their destination, written by five unnamed people who come from an unnamed, war-torn country form the...

Feminist writer bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions is a passionate exploration of how we do and appeal to how we should love. What...

The pain of growing up is the main character in Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Woods. Toru Watanabe finds himself at a crossways, having to...

(english version below) Andrea Camilleri è l’autore molto amato dei romanzi polizieschi sul commissario Montalbano (28 romanzi ed alcuni...

Yaa Gyasi’s stunning debut novel Homegoing traces the story of a Ghanaian family as it plays out both in the Asante region and in...

Fathers and Sons is Howard Cunnell’s beautiful memoir about growing up, about love and masculinity, about fathers and sons. This short...

The Sellout is a work of biting satire, and you best be ready for it when you open this book. Our protagonist is a young man who grew up...

“The black baby’s crying wormed and bloomed.” When a pale and black-eyed baby is born in its black caul, Rue hesitates before freeing it...

Everyone who eats should read this book! What should we have for dinner? For omnivores like ourselves this question always causes...

In the 1970s everyone knows The Six. Their songs are played on every radio station, their records and world tours sell out in the blink...

I have finally (!!) read To Kill a Mockingbird, after it had waited on top of my to-be-read list for years. Books with so much history...

What would the world look like, if we didn’t assume the worst of our fellow human beings? If collectively we had a positive, an...

In their powerful and eye-opening manifesto Revolting Prostitutes, Juno Mac and Molly Smith make the point for sex workers’ rights loud...

Ah, this book! This is one that is going to stay with me for a long time. While reading it, I was already looking forward to starting it...

Last week I read both an essay collection and a novel by the celebrated Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. Africa’s Tarnished Name is a...

Poetic and heart-breaking. Those are the first words that come to mind when I think about Toni Morrison’s masterpiece Beloved. I only...

"Youth is an irreplaceable treasure, and the only respectable thing to do with irreplaceable treasure is to waste it."

I stumbled upon Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town on some reading list online – and I am so glad I did! Something...

English version below Un Tempo Gentile di Milena Agus è ambientato in un piccolo paese della Sardegna contadina, dimenticata e isolata....

“This is the story of our love affair with books, whether we arrange them on our shelves, inhale their smell, scrawl in their margins or...

English version below Scherzetto di Domenico Starnone è la storia di un incontro di quattro giorni tra un nonno scontroso e suo nipote di...

“Writing and gardening, these two ways of rendering the world in rows, have a great deal in common.” Disguised as a gardening book,...

Nina is 32, a successful food writer working on her third book, finally owns property in London – even though it is a bit shabby and has...

In the Bec-da-Gaz bar, towards the end of 1932, philosopher Raymond Aron made a statement that would kickstart the development of...

In 2020 I read 69 books, fiction and non-fiction and all very different. So it was of course hard to pick favourites. But here are my top...

Imagine you had the opportunity to try on different lives – parallel (or perpendicular) to the one you lead. Who and where would you be,...

Over the past few weeks I read my way through the 2020 Booker Prize Shortlist – and a month after Shuggie Bain has been announced the...

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2015 essay Between the World and Me is a great contemporary read to follow James Baldwin's essays. Coates picks up...

I had a wonderful week: I spent it with James Baldwin's essays in The Fire Next Time and Notes of a Native Son. I first fell in love with...

“The only people for me are the mad one, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same...

(English version below) Accabadora è un termine sardo che descrive la figura responsabile di aiutare le persone in età avanzata a morire...

Everyone, please stop whatever you are doing and go read Jamaica Kincaid's essay A Small Place! This is a work about colonialism, an...

It has almost been two weeks since I finished reading Naked Lunch and I am still not sure what to make of it. Therefore, the following is...