Set in a Greek village in 1942, and purportedly written from his imagination by a Danish man before he was picked up by the Gestapo and not seen again, here is Ariel Dorfman’s haunting and universal parable of individual courage in the face of political oppression. Widows forms a testament to the disappeared—those living under totalitarian regimes the world over, who are taken away for "questioning" and never return.One by one, the bodies of men wash up on the shore of the river, wh...

More than a hundred years after his birth, Pablo Neruda’s poetry is as vital and beloved as ever.This collection presents fifty of the most essential poems by one of history’s greatest poets in dynamic new translations, the result of an unprecedented collaboration among a team of poets, translators, and the world’s leading Neruda scholars.A definitive selection that draws from the entire breadth of Neruda’s various styles, themes, and periods, The Essential Neruda ...

The complete sonnets of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—in English and SpanishThis landmark collection brings together for the first time in any language all of the sonnets of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. More intimate and personally revealing than his fiction, and more classical in form than the inventive metafictions that are his hallmark, the sonnets reflect Borges in full maturity, paying homage to many of his liter...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “bracing” (Vox) guide for surviving and resisting America’s turn towards authoritarianism, from “a rising public intellectual unafraid to make bold connections between past and present” (The New York Times)“Timothy Snyder reasons with unparalleled clarity, throwing the past and future into sharp relief. He has writ...

What’s it like to be the son or daughter of a dictator? A monster on the Stalin level? What’s it like to bear a name synonymous with oppression, terror, and evil?Jay Nordlinger set out to answer that question, and does so in this book. He surveys 20 dictators in all. They are the worst of the worst: Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and so on. The book is not about them, really, though of course they figure in it. It’s about their children.Some of them are abs...

Wilhelm Reich's classic study, written during the years of the German crisis, is a unique contribution to the understanding of one of the crucial phenomena of our times-fascism. Reich firmly repudiates the concept that fascism is the ideology or action of a single individual or nationality, or any ethnic or political group. He also denies a purely socio-economic explanation as advanced by Marxist ideologists. He understands fascism as the expression of the irrational character structure of...

What is fascism? Is it revolutionary? Or is it reactionary? This book argues that it is both: fascism unleashes violence against the left and ethnic minorities, but also condemns the bourgeoisie for its 'softness'. Kevin Passmore opens his book with a series of 'scenes from fascist life' - a secret meeting of the Romanian Iron Guard; Mussolini meeting the king of Italy; a rally of Hungarian doctors calling for restrictions on the number of Jews entering the profession; the shooting of 1800...

Coming to terms with a new period of uncertainty when it is still replete with possibilitiesThis quick and engaging study clearly lays out the United States’ current democratic crisis. Examining the early stages of the Nazi movement in Germany, William E. Connolly detects synergies with Donald Trump’s rhetorical style. Tapping into a sense of contemporary fragility, Aspirational Fascism pays particular attention to how conflicts between neoliberalism and t...

In some circles, a nod towards totalitarianism is enough to dismiss any critique of the status quo. Such is the insidiousness of the neo-liberal ideology, argues Slavoj iek. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? turns a specious rhetorical strategy on its head to identify a network of family resemblances between totalitarianism and modern liberal democracy. iek argues that totalitarianism is invariably defined in terms of four things: the Holocaust as the ultimate, diabolical evil...

"A crisp, dramatic examination of how technology and human ingenuity are undermining North Korea's secretive dictatorship."— Kirkus ReviewsOne of the least understood countries in the world, North Korea has long been known for its repressive regime. Yet it is far from being an impenetrable black box. Media flows covertly into the country, and fault lines are appearing in the government's sealed informational borders.Drawing on deeply personal inter...

Hindenburg reveals how a previously little-known general, whose career to normal retirement age had provided no real foretaste of his heroic status, became a national icon and living myth in Germany after the First World War, capturing the imagination of millions. In a period characterized by rupture and fragmentation, the legend surrounding Paul von Hindenburg brought together a broad coalition of Germans and became one of the most potent forces in Weimar politics. Charting the o...

A pictorial history of the two Nazi-German World War II concentration camps in Poland, featuring rare photographs from wartime archives.Auschwitz and Birkenau were separated from each other by about a forty-five-minute walk. Auschwitz was adapted to hold political prisoners in 1940 and evolved into a killing machine in 1941. Later that year a new site called Birkenau was found to extend the Auschwitz complex. Here a vast complex of buildings was constructed to hold ...