Daniel Stein, a Polish Jew, miraculously survives the Holocaust by working in the Gestapo as a translator. After the war, he converts to Catholicism, becomes a priest, enters the Order of Barefoot Carmelites and emigrates to Israel. Despite this seeming impossibility, the life and destiny of Daniel Stein are not an invention, the character is based on the life of Oswald Rufeisen, the real Brother Daniel, a Carmelite monk.

In Daniel Stein, Interpreter, Daniel's ability and willingness to communicate with all cultures, to translate across linguistic and cultural divides, assures his freedom and stands as a symbol of love, humanity and tolerance.

Ludmila Ulitskaya was born in the Urals. Shortly before perestroika she became Repertory Director of the Hebrew Theatre of Moscow. She is the author of fourteen fiction books, three children's books and six plays. She is Russia's bestselling novelist and was recently named a laureate of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize, an international human rights prize for women's freedom.

Summer Resort, the first novel by noted translator Esther Kinsky, is set in a village somewhere on the endless Hungarian plain. It is the hottest summer in memory and everyone in the village dreams of the sweet life in Üdülö, a summer resort on a river. The characters that populate Summer Resort tell stories—comic, tragic, or both—of life in rural Hungary. Tales of onion kings and melon pickers, of scrapyards and sugar beet factories, paint a vivid and human picture of their world

In the course of the novel, the storytellers' paths intersect at the summer resort with the bar owner Lacibacsi, the Kozak Boys and their fat and pale wives, and the builder Antal, who introduces a mysterious new woman to the inhabitants of the resort. The stranger disrupts their otherwise staid summer routines—with surprising, unpredictable consequences.

In June 1941, Nazi troops march on Leningrad and surround it. Hitler's plan is to shell, bomb, and starve the city into submission. Most of the cultural elite are evacuated early in the siege, but Dmitri Shostakovich, the most famous composer in Russia, stays on to defend his city, digging ditches and fire-watching. At night he composes a new work. But after Shostakovich and his family are forced to evacuate, only Karl Eliasberg—a shy and difficult man, conductor of the second-rate Radio Orchestra—and an assortment of musicians are left behind in Leningrad to face an unendurable winter and start rehearsing the finished score of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony.

Sarah Quigley is a fiction writer, poet, non-fiction writer and reviewer. She has received and been short-listed for several high profile awards and has been published in anthologies in New Zealand and the UK. Having been the recipient of the Berlin Writers' Residency, she now lives in Berlin.

Filled with memories of the four-year siege of Sarajevo, Gemma reluctantly boards a flight from her native Rome to that war-scarred city with her sixteen-year-old son, Pietro. She hopes to teach her son about the city of his birth and about Diego, the father he never knew. Once there Gemma is caught between the present and the past, reliving her love affair with Diego, their determination to start a family, and their deep connection to Sarajevo even as the threat of war loomed.

In this haunting and sophisticated novel, Mazzantini masterfully probes the startling emotional territory of what makes a family—particularly what makes a mother. As the fate of Sarajevo converges with Gemma's all-consuming desire to have a child we see how far she is driven, in a stunning revelation that is both heartbreaking and cathartic.

Margaret Mazzantini lives in Rome with her husband and four children. Twice Born won Italy's Premio Campiello. Her previous novel Don't Move sold 1.5 million copies in Italy, won the Premio Strega and became a feature film directed by her husband, Sergio Castellitto and starring Penelope Cruz.

In 1931, a young woman writer living in Germany was inspired by Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to describe pre-war Berlin and the age of cinematic glamour through the eyes of a woman. The resulting novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, became an acclaimed bestseller and a masterwork of German literature, in the tradition of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories and Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera. Like Isherwood and Brecht, Keun revealed the dark underside of Berlin's "golden twenties" with empathy and honesty. Unfortunately, a Nazi censorship board banned Keun's work in 1933 and destroyed all existing copies of The Artificial Silk Girl. Only one English translation was published, in Great Britain, before the book disappeared in the chaos of the ensuing war. Today, more than seven decades later, the story of this quintessential "material girl" remains as relevant as ever, as an accessible new translation brings this lost classic to light once more. Other Press is pleased to announce the republication of The Artificial Silk Girl, elegantly translated by noted Germanist Kathie von Ankum, and with a new introduction by Harvard professor Maria Tatar.

Sanna and her ravishing friend Gerti would rather speak of love than politics, but in 1930s Frankfurt, politics cannot be escaped--even in the lady's bathroom. Crossing town one evening to meet up with Gerti's Jewish lover, a blockade cuts off the girls' path—it is the Füher in a motorcade procession, and the crowd goes mad striving to catch a glimpse of Hitler's raised "empty hand." Then the parade is over, and in the long hours after midnight Sanna and Gerti will face betrayal, death, and the heartbreaking reality of being young in an era devoid of innocence or romance.

In 1937, German author Irmgard Keun had only recently fled Nazi Germany with her lover Joseph Roth when she wrote this slim, exquisite, and devastating book. It captures the unbearable tension, contradictions, and hysteria of pre-war Germany like no other novel. Yet even as it exposes human folly, the book exudes a hopeful humanism. It is full of humor and light, even as it describes the first moments of a nightmare. After Midnight is a masterpiece that deserves to be read and remembered anew.