The Age of Reason: Popular Penguins

Jean-Paul Sartre

Set in the volatile Paris summer of 1938, The Age of Reasonfollows two days in the life of Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher, and his circle in the cafes and bars of Montparnasse. Mathieu has so far managed to contain sex and personal freedom in conveniently separate compartments. But now he is in t...

Forbidden Colours

Yukio Mishima

Written when Mishima was only twentysix, "Forbidden Colors" is a depiction of a male homosexual relationship, in which a rich older man buys the love of a young man who is stunningly handsome but who lacks the ability to love. As in "Mann's Death in Venice", the older man's longing for the beauty of you...

The Tattooist of Auschwitz

Heather Morris

The Tattooist of Auschwitz is based on the true story of Lale and Gita Sokolov, two Slovakian Jews, who survived Auschwitz and eventually made their home in Australia. In that terrible place, Lale was given the job of tattooing the prisoners marked for survival-literally scratching numbers into his fell...