Wehrmacht officer Karl Bazinger is living the high life in Occupied Paris. But with his glamorous dinner companions and his open disdain for the Nazis, he begins to attract the attention of the SS. He is drawn into further trouble when he receives a suspicious visit from a friend who may be involved in resistance activities. To lower his profile, Karl requests a transfer to Kiev, where he discovers the extent of the Nazi atrocities. He then begins to suffer from a mysterious ailment, and through the ministrations of a beautiful Russian doctor, he finds his vital reconnection to hope. Urbane,...

Soleiman Adel Guemar was born and raised in Algiers where he worked as a journalist. He published numerous stories and won two national poetry prizes. In 2002 he left Algeria to seek safety for himself and his family in the UK. 'Sate of Emergency', a representative selection of Guemar's poetry, is rooted in Algerian experience, speaking of urgent concerns everywhere - oppression, resistance, state violence, traumas and private dreams. His poetry sings of life's sensual pleasures in the face of the grotesque morbidity of violent political repression. In the excellent translation by Tom...

This fascinating history of mind doctors and their patients probes the ways in which madness, badness, and sadness have been understood over the last two centuries. Lisa Appignanesi charts a story from the days when the mad were considered possessed to our own century when the official psychiatric manual lists some 350 mental disorders. Women play a key role here, both as patients--among them Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Marilyn Monroe--and as therapists. Controversially, Appignanesi argues that women have significantly changed the nature of mind-doctoring, but in the process they have...