January 2026

A street through a wall

Five poems from Saudi Arabia

"Life is already difficult enough"

Egyptian author Ahmed Abdel Moneim Ramadan on how absurdity and fantasy mirror Egypt’s social and political realities, shifts in the literary landscape, the economics of writing, and the tension between profession and art.

Where decisions speak softly

"Into the Uncut Grass": Trevor Noah and Sabina Hahn tell why sometimes you just have to start running to get home. A fable about friendship, freedom and the gentle weight of decisions

On the present state of Moroccan literature

On canon formation, linguistic diversity and literature beyond the centre

"Hitler was a leftist"

In "Das Deutsche Demokratische Reich" (The German Democratic Reich), historian Volker Weiß shows how right-wing politics is made possible today by the rewriting and reinterpreting of history

Against "colonial amnesia"

In his transcontinental family history "Tabak und Schokolade", Martin R. Dean reconstructs Switzerland's colonial entanglements using a wide variety of memory media

Bound to be Re-Read?

‚Bound to Violence‘ by Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem was republished as a Penguin Modern Classic, a series of books self-defined as “shaping the reading habits of generations since 1961”

Not a lyrical medicine cabinet, more like a colourful plate

Hannes Wesendonk's poems reveal a recurring interplay between banality, seriousness and nonsense