After World War II, Anne De Vries, the most popular novelist in the Netherlands, was commissioned to capture in literary form the spirit and agony of those five harrowing years of Nazi occupation. The result was Journey Through the Night, a bestselling four-volume series that has gone through more than 30 printings in the Netherlands. This series, which appeals to both young people and adults, is now available in English translation: Volume 1: Into the Darkness Volume 2: The Darkness Deepens Volume 3: Dawn's Early Light Volume 4: A New Day

When it was published in 1932, this revolutionary first fiction redefined the art of the novel with its black humor, its nihilism, and its irreverent, explosive writing style, and made Louis-Ferdinand Celine one of France's--and literature's--most important 20th-century writers. The picaresque adventures of Bardamu, the sarcastic and brilliant antihero of Journey to the End of the Night move from the battlefields of World War I (complete with buffoonish officers and cowardly soldiers), to French West Africa, the United States, and back to France in a style of prose that's lyrical, hallucinatory, and hilariously scathing toward nearly everybody and everything. Yet, beneath it all one can detect a gentle core of idealism.

Traditional depictions of London at night have imagined a lawless orgy of depravity and pestilence. But is Britain’s capital after dark now as bland and unthreatening as an evening in any new provincial town? Sukhdev Sandhu journeys across the city to find out whether the London night really has been rendered insipid by street lighting and CCTV. Night Haunts seeks to reclaim the mystery and romance of the city—to revitalize the great myth of London for a new century.

Sleep leads his varied parade of human and animal followers on a protected journey to his sister Dream, who then takes them to the special place where anything is possible.

In 1948 a Holocaust memoir was published in German under the title Notes from a Bunker and under the authorship of Jakob Littner. In 1991 the book was republished as Jakob Littner's Notes from a Bunker, authored by Wolfgang Koeppen, a noted postwar German novelist, who died in 1996. The dust jacket of the new edition bore the rubric "A Novel, " and in his brief preface Koeppen explained: "The man who had escaped was looking for a writer....The publisher asked me: 'Do you want to write it?' This human being who had been so abused wanted to get away. He emigrated to America. He promised me an honorarium -- two care packages each month. I ate American rations and wrote the story about the suffering of a German Jew. In doing so, it became my story." "My story"? Critics have wondered about that. Is the book fictional at all? And if so, how much? As it turns out, Koeppen worked from a fully completed typescript written by one Jakob Littner who did indeed experience the horrific events described inthe "novel" and emigrated to America, where he died in 1950. This is his own true story, with additional family and historical material provided by a younger relative. Littner's story is unusual because it takes place not in a concentration camp, but in a town in Ukraine on the Eastern front. Littner's memoir traces his life from Munich, where he was a highly successful stamp dealer, to the ghetto of Zbaraz in Ukraine. In spare but harrowing prose, it describes the destruction of the Jews of Zbaraz and Littner's almost miraculous survival through chance and resourcefulness, and the remarkable actions of Christa, a beautiful German woman who had been his business partner in Munich. One element thatis sure to spark controversy is the active role of the Jewish Council and Jewish Militia in the killing of the Jews of Zbaraz.

A detailed study of Céline's novel, Journey to the End of the Night

One of South America's most celebrated contemporary poets takes us on a fantastic voyage to mysterious lands and seas, into the psyche, and to the heart of the poem itself. Night Journey is the English-language debut of the work that won María Negroni an Argentine National Book Award. It is a book of dreams--dreams she renders with surreal beauty that recalls the work of her compatriot Alejandra Pizarnik, with the penetrating subtlety of Borges and Calvino. In sixty-two tightly woven prose poems, Negroni deftly infuses haunting imagery with an ironic, personal spirituality. Effortlessly she navigates the nameless subject to the slopes of the Himalayas, to a bar in Buenos Aires, through war, from icy Scandinavian landscapes to the tropics, across seas, toward a cemetery in the wake of Napoleon's hearse, by train, by taxis headed in unrequested directions, past mirrors and birds, between life and death. Night Journey reflects a mastery of a traditional form while brilliantly expressing a modern condition: the multicultural, multifaceted individual, ever in motion. Displacement abounds: a "medieval tabard" where a pelvis should be, a "lipless grin," a "beach severed from the ocean." In one poem "nomadic cities" whisk past. In another, smiling cockroaches loom in a visiting mother's eyes. Anne Twitty, whose elegant translations are accompanied by the Spanish originals, remarks in her preface that the book's "indomitable literary intelligence" subdues an unspoken terror--helplessness. Yet, as observed by the angel Gabriel, the consoling voice of wisdom, only by accepting the journey for what it is can one discover its "hidden splendor," the "invisible center of the poem." As readers of this magnificent work will discover, this is a journey that, because its every fleeting image conjures a thousand words of fertile silence, can be savored again and again.