Popular European Cultural Books
Find cultural books written by authors from Europe for the next part of the Read Around The World Challenge. (63)
41.
FranceDescription:
A haunting, bizarre short story collection about violence, mental illness, and the warped contradictions of the twentieth-century female experience. A close friend and protégé of Marguerite Duras, Barbara Molinard (1921-1986) wrote and wrote feverishly, but only managed to publish one book in her lifetime: the surreal, nightmarish collection Panics. These thirteen stories beat with a frantic, off-kilter rhythm as Molinard obsesses over sickness, death, and control. A woman becomes transfixed by a boa constrictor at her local zoo, mysterious surgeons dismember their patient, and the author narr... continue
42.
Penance by Eliza Clark EN
Country: Europe / 
United Kingdom
United Kingdom
Description:
On a beach in a run-down seaside town on the Yorkshire coastline, sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson is set on fire by three other schoolgirls.
Nearly a decade after the horrifying murder, journalist Alec Z. Carelli has written the definitive account of the crime, drawn from hours of interviews with witnesses and family members, painstaking historical research, and most notably, correspondence with the killers themselves. The result is a riveting snapshot of lives rocked by tragedy, and a town left in turmoil.
But how much of the story is true?
Compulsively readable, provocative, and distur... continue
43.
Pleasantview by Celeste Mohammed EN
Country: Europe / 
Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago
Description:
Coconut trees. Carnival. Rum and coke. To many outsiders, these and other sunny images are all they know about life in the Caribbean. However, if you want to learn how the locals truly live and experience the dark and often harrowing truths that lurk behind the idyllic imagery of Caribbean culture, then come visit the town of Pleasantview. Come during election season, and see how one candidate sets out to slaughter endangered turtles - just for fun. Or come on the day the other candidate beats his "outside-woman," so badly she ends up losing their baby. Then come on the night of the political ... continue
44.
Reinventing Love : How the Patriarchy Sabotages Heterosexual Relations by Mona Chollet EN
Country: Europe / 
Switzerland
Switzerland
Description:
A new work by the author of “In Defense of Witches” that seeks to redefine heterosexual relationships and give women back their voice. As feminist principles have taken wider hold in society, and basic ideas about equality for women can seem a given, many women still struggle in one of the most important areas of life: love. Whether it’s finding a partner, seeking a commitment from one, or struggling in a relationship that is unfulfilling or even potentially abusive, women still find that deeply-engrained notions of gender and behavior can be obstacles to a healthy, loving relationship. In her... continue
45.
Seven Hanged by Leonid Andreyev EN
RussiaDescription:
'It was like walking along the knife-edge of the highest possible mountain range, seeing life on one side and death on the other in the form of two deep, gorgeous and gleaming seascapes.' This astonishing novella from 1908, newly translated for Little Black Classics by War and Peace translator Anthony Briggs, probes the emotions and experiences of seven people condemned to death in Tsarist Russia. A powerful and subtle exploration of the morality of capital punishment, it was a bestseller at the time, and, in a strange quirk of history, influenced the conspirators in the cataclysmic assassinat... continue
46.
Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg EN
DenmarkDescription:
She thinks more highly of snow and ice than she does of love. She lives in a world of numbers, science and memories--a dark, exotic stranger in a strange land. And now Smilla Jaspersen is convinced she has uncovered a shattering crime... It happened in the Copenhagen snow. A six-year-old boy, a Greenlander like Smilla, fell to his death from the top of his apartment building. While the boy's body is still warm, the police pronounce his death an accident. But Smilla knows her young neighbor didn't fall from the roof on his own. Soon she is following a path of clues as clear to her as footsteps ... continue
47.
Strait is the Gate by André Gide EN
Description:
Jerome Palissier, a delicate boy, spends many summers at his uncle's house in Normandy, where the whole world seems steeped in azure. There he falls deeply in love with his cousin Alissa and she with him. But gradually Alissa becomes convinced that Jerome's love for her is endangering his soul.
Belgium49.
Tell Me Why You Fled: True Stories of Seeking Refuge by Karen O’Reilly EN
Country: Europe / United Kingdom
United Kingdom
Description:
A candid and irreverent memoir about helping people find refuge - from war, and torture and genocide - as a young woman seeking refuge from herself.
50.
The Appointment : A Novel by Katharina Volckmer EN
GermanyDescription:
“A darkly funny untangling of national and sexual identity.” —The Guardian * “Transgressive...Incendiary.” —The New Yorker * “A furious comic monologue...with a disregard for propriety worthy of Alexander Portnoy.” —The New York Times Book Review * “Sexy, hilarious, and subversive.” —The Paris Review For readers of Ottessa Moshfegh and Han Kang, a whip-smart debut novel in which a woman on the verge of major change addresses her doctor in a stream of consciousness narrative. In a well-appointed examination in London, a young woman unburdens herself to a certain Dr. Seligman. Though she can bar... continue