The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge
One winter afternoon Comrade Tulayev, an important Party official, is shot dead. By the time The Case of Comrade …
Category Archives: Fiction
Gustav Flaubert on Love and Revolution
Gustav Flaubert, known in the entire literate world as the author of Madame Bovary and not much beyond that, …
The Use of Man — Aleksandar Tišma
Wars are waged and war novels are written. Seldom are they written about small, out-of-the-way places or non-heroic people, …
The Communist – A Novel from Italy
The number of readers for a novel titled The Communist, in the United States, with its long history of …
The War: A Memoir – Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Donnadieu was seventeen years old when she moved to France from a small village near Saigon, Vietnam, where …
The Gallery by John Horne Burns: Americans in Naples, 1944
Missing in almost all war fiction, from the time of Gilgamesh (2800 BCE) on, is the recognition that war …
One Man’s Justice – Akira Yoshimura
The stories we tell about what we know and what we suppose, what we fear and what we love, …
A Small Circus – Hans Fallada; Small town life in 1929 Germany
One of the most memorable and powerful novels I have read in recent years is Hans Fallada‘s Every Man …
Soldiers Alive – A Novel of the Japanese in China, 1937
For century upon century, from the time of the stories of Gilgamesh (18th BCE), stories of war have been told …
Red Cavalry — Isaac Babel; Russia at War
In between wars are other wars. Men fight in them all, whatever is available. Between World War I and …
War Resistance in Japan, WWII
Avoidance of conscription in Japan during WWII was the most heinous of crimes: worse than rape, or murder. Those …
Resistance and Subversion in Literature and Movies
We like our stories of resistance to great evil to include bold cunning, great daring and a good complement …