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The first full biography of this innovative 20th-century photographer vividly depicts his life and works from Hungary to France and America.Born in Budapest in 1894, André Kertész soared to star status in Jazz Age Paris, tumbled into poverty and obscurity in wartime New York, slogged through 14 years shooting for House & Garden, then improbably reemerged into the spotlight with a 1964 retrospective at New York?s Museum of Modern Art. By the time of his death in 1985, he had exhibited around the world, taken more than 100,000 images, and steered the medium in new and vital directions: He was the first major photographer to embrace the Leica, the camera now mythically linked to street photography, and he pioneered subjective photojournalism, publishing what is arguably the world?s first great photo essay.Drawing on dozens of interviews, previous scholarship, and deep archival research, and interrogating the images themselves, Patricia Albers retrieves aspects of Kertész?s life that he and his pictures gloss over, among them the ordeals of trench warfare, the impact of the Holocaust, and the tale of his tangled romances. She takes Kertész from the Eastern front in World War I to the Paris of Piet Mondrian, Colette, Alexander Calder, and a lively Central European diaspora. From Condé Nast?s postwar media empire to the ?photo boom? of the 1970s. She revisits Kertész?s relationships with other photographers, among them his frenemy Brassai and protégé Robert Capa. She breathes life into a gentle, generous, and unassuming man endowed with Old-World charm but also sputtering with grievance and rage and inclined to indulge in deception. Everything Is Photograph immerses readers in the heyday of a now-lost version of photography. Freshly seen, formally vigorous, emotionally rich, and aesthetically charged, Kertész?s images speak of the medium as a tool for human connection, inquiry about the world, self-narration, and self-invention, even as they project its mysteries.

A European civil servant specializing in strategic foresight, Jean Detrez works on the future with scientific rigor. However, the unexpected seems to invade his life, both professional and personal. The Brexit referendum, the election of Trump, the separation from his partner, the death of his father, but also a night inexplicably spent with a stranger. Questioning what to do with time, the one passing and the one to come, leads him from professional life where anticipation is a scientific discipline, to private life where the past troubles the future. Do we want to know what the next few days or weeks have in store for us? Do we want to know if we are going to experience a new romantic or sexual adventure in the hours to come? Or how close death really is? This novel is an experiment in the ways in which fiction disrupts our representation of reality. Jean Deprez foresees events that do not occur, does not imagine those that will crush him, does not always perceive what he is experiencing, and is never certain that his reconstruction of the past is faithful to what happened.

Struck by a name written on a facade of his new home, acclaimed author Herve Le Tellier embarked on a quest to recover the history of Andre Chaix, a resistance fighter, a maquisard, killed at the age of 20 in August 1944. Deftly combining historical fragments into a vivid narrative, Le Tellier invites us on a journey through one of the most troubled times: the inexhaustible Second World War. While avoiding simplistic, romantic tropes, he evokes the courage of a young man taking up arms, like many others, in what is also the story of a magnificent love with an equally impressive young woman, Simone. Made even more powerful and necessary by the current rise of fascism, The Name on the Wall gives voice to the ideals for which Chaix died and questions our deepest nature, this desire to belong to something greater than ourselves, which leads to the best and the worst.

In the wake of Donald Trump''s election, renowned medievalist Patrick Boucheron delivered a powerful, probing series of lectures on ''political fictions'' in the context of rising authoritarianism and populism. Adapted here for the first time in English, they offer key insights into how we arrived at our current global moment and what history can teach us about moving forward. Long before Trump parlayed his reality TV character into a presidential victory with the MAGA movement, aspiring rulers have used the art of storytelling and the power of fable to control others. Discussing seminal works from Machiavelli''s The Prince and Hobbes''s Leviathan to Orwell''s 1984 and the writings of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, Boucheron explores the profound interconnectedness of political theory and fiction, and the tension between politics and the political.

Central Italy, on the eve of the Second World War. A group of young Italians find themselves in the midst of what will soon become a civil war. Among them is Stefano Portelli, a hopeful lawyer with a head full of utopias, in love with Eleonora. And there is his sister-in-law Nina, secretly linked to Sergio, a partisan leader. Other lives run parallel to theirs: that of Alastair Ormiston, an English Royal Air Force Pilot, who adores Virginia Woolf''s books and dreams of the ideal companion. And that of Edna, his best friend who, in a London bombed by the Nazis, discovers herself and her happiness. If their paths intersect in a shocking way, shuffling the cards of history, it will be through the work of a destiny greater than them, burning them in a bonfire where everything is consumed - joy and pain together.

When the Chinese premier visits Harvard, international student Pei Lulu encounters a lone protester, who will drastically change her understanding of the People''s Republic and her own place in the world. For the first time, Lulu learns of the 1989 protest movement and the government''s violent response. Determined to find out more, she seeks answers from her family, who share surprising stories of their involvement, and from a formative university course based on powerful firsthand accounts. At once a compelling coming-of-age tale and a poignant tribute to the courage of activists, Looking for Tank Man keeps this tragedy alive in the public memory and warns against the dangers of authoritarian regimes.

''Europe is a garden... It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity, and social cohesion that the humankind has been able to build... Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.'' This is how Josep Borrell, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, characterized the situation in 2022, several months after Russia''s invasion of Ukraine and one year before Israel''s war against Gaza. Europe has a singular image of itself and of the world. It persists in thinking of itself as the cradle of civilization, the incarnation of good and justice, threatened by a global environment where savagery, darkness, and evil reign. Clinging to this fantasy inherited from a colonial past, it is lost and misguided, turning its back on the values of humanism and equality to which it nevertheless claims to adhere. As long as Europe and, with it, the political West, have not renounced their desire for power, there will unite against them the resentment of all the peoples who have had the bitter experience of their domination over the last five centuries. Because the ''jungle'' is Europe''s own creation, produced by the blindness of conquest and exploitation. This powerful essay is an invitation to rebuild a Europe that is truly concerned about the fragility of the world and of life, with an acute awareness of the perils that threaten humanity.

Why is grass in airports so important? Can you be an extraordinary copyist without knowing how to read or write? Are there successful musicians who only play a single note in their life? Book after book, Fabio Morabito''s stories have become increasingly radical in their way of showing us that imagination is not a curious feature of the mind, but perhaps the only way to not feel excluded from the real world. With prose free of unnecessary explanation and descriptive embellishments, The Shadow of the Mammoth insists once again on the guiding principle of Morabito''s work: playing fair with the reader, who advances in reading these stories as he did when writing them, open to any direction they could take. For this reason, these stories are as unexpected as they are different from each other, all united by that pleasure of storytelling that has always been Morabito''s unmistakable hallmark.

In 1931, a young writer named Irmgard Keun 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 Three Penny 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.

When in 1999 30-year-old Matteo B. Bianchi published his debut novel - a scathing portrait of the sentimental education of a gay boy from Milan in the 1980s - the timing couldn''t be worse: he had just lost S., the man he''d lived with for 7 years, who one day, a few months after they broke up, decided to hang himself in their apartment. Matteo is the first to find the body, to scream without being able to scream. From that day a ''dark labyrinth'' ensnares him, a whirlpool of suffering, made up of contradictory feelings and constant bewilderment, which unites all the so-called survivors of the suicide of a loved one. Matteo seems to be the unhappy protagonist of a rare event as he feels a unique pain, perversely special. However, at the same time, even in the darkest days, the writer who lives in him starts taking notes. At first, they are just fragments, shards of an existence shattered into a thousand pieces, echoes of feelings alive like nerves that Matteo reports unabashedly on the page. Then, they slowly transform and, memory after memory, become a profound and intimate conversation with S. and the pain, between the temptation to let go and the desire to get back to life. Both radical and vulnerable, intimate and universal, The Life of Those Who Remain is a devastating but luminous novel about surviving the aftermath of trauma. Bianchi produces pages of excruciating beauty, recounting his journey to redemption, hope, and rebirth, and showing how, even in the depths of the most unspeakable pain, writing-his own, and also powerful works such as Joan Didion''s The Year of Magical Thinking and Ocean Vuong''s On Earth We''re Briefly Gorgeous-can still save.

In the heart of Cantal, in the heat of the summer of 1914, the men resigned themselves to going off to fight, far away. Joseph, just 15 years old, must take care of the family farm with his mother, his grandmother, and Leonard, an old neighbor who has become his friend. On the property next door, Valette, kept away from the war due to an atrophied hand, dwells on his grudges and his rage. And now he has to take in his brother''s wife and daughter, who have sought refuge with him. The arrival of the two women will end up upsetting a hitherto immutable order and awakening buried passions.

When Iris took over the family hotel from her grandfather, Bad Heim was still a popular spa town. But now fierce forest fires rage in the area, spewing smoke into the air. The summers are dry and hot and never seem to end. Guests have become a rare sight. But suddenly, a young mother shows up with her small daughter and asks for a room. Something doesn''t seem right about her. Does she need help? Or even pose a threat? Franziska Gansler''s debut conjures up the heat of the fires, the ashes falling on skin, and the all-pervading smell of smoke. Yet you will want to stay with these women in this inhospitable place as they draw closer together and prepare to fight for their freedom.

In spring of 1945, the war is about to end. The French coast is littered with mines the Nazis hid under the sand to prevent the Allies from landing. In Hyeres, on the Cote d''Azur, German prisoners are forced to clear the beaches. Alongside them, members of the Resistance and other French volunteers face the same dangerous task. With no maps of the bombs'' locations, they must be guided only by the faint trembling of the sticks they carry to detect them, in terror of being blown up. French and Germans work together, depending on each other - what grim irony - to survive, with the common goal of deactivating the mines, one by one. But this is not their only goal: Lukas plans to escape, Saskia wants to know who betrayed her family, Vincent is looking for Ariane, the woman he loves, and the Germans hold the key to her disappearance. Historian by training and screenwriter by profession, Claire Deya brilliantly portrays the aftermath of a war that won''t truly be over until all the mines have been deactivated, showing that ''people who think the fighting stops when you lay down your arms are wrong.'' BLAST captures the beginning of a post-war period in which everyone must rebuild their lives and identities, and overcome the obsessions that prevent them from healing. Revenge, mistrust, and guilt, but also solidarity, love, and forgiveness intertwine in this extraordinary novel that readers won''t be able to put down until the surprising ending.

A man travels to Lisbon ahead of his wife to prepare their newly purchased home, while she stays in New York to oversee a research project on the neuroscience of memory and fear. Leaving behind a phase of their relationship indelibly marked by 9/11, he revels in the Portuguese capital''s temperate weather and the neighbourhood''s calm, meticulously planning the details of their future. Yet beneath the peace and quiet of this routine, he feels a growing unease he can''t explain. Is it the similarity between the two cities, and the two apartments? A mysterious threat waiting in the wings? A brilliant, deceptively simple novel of psychological suspense, YOUR STEPS ON THE STAIRS explores how our emotions and memories shape our perception of reality. With his subtle, masterful style, Antonio Munoz Molina lays bare the fragility of the stories we so carefully craft about ourselves.

For days, documentary filmmaker Andrea and her team have been waiting for Richard Wechsler in his Swiss hometown. During their first shoots in Paris, the famous writer had not wanted to reveal much about himself, and now the whole film threatens to fail. In the narrow streets and alleys of the village, Andrea searches for traces of Wechsler''s life, contrary to their agreement. But it is not until she starts reading his books again that she discovers a clue to a childhood sweetheart who might still be living there. An old love who influenced his whole life, but whom no one ever knew about.

In 1789 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visits the grave of Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig, looking for a sign, a signal, an answer to an enigma that has haunted him since childhood: Was Bach murdered by a famous oculist? And years later, was Handel a victim of the same doctor? Allegro follows his investigation, from the salons of London to the streets of Paris, recreating an enthralling and turbulent time, full of rogues and brilliant composers, charlatans and presumptuous nobles. Running parallel to this search is the rise of Mozart, his knowledge and fame, his trials and losses.