An NYRB Classics Original A humble clerk and his loving wife scrape out a quiet existence on the margins of Tokyo. Resigned, following years of exile and misfor

In 1683, an Ottoman army that stretched from horizon to horizon set out to seize the "Golden Apple," as Turks referred to Vienna. The ensuing siege pitted battl

In 1971 a young French ethnologist named Francois Bizot was taken prisoner by forces of the Khmer Rouge who kept him chained in a jungle camp for months before

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred practically all Chinese from American shores for ten years, was the first federal law that banned a group of imm