Suzanne Ruta

  • culture Sept/Oct/Nov 2008

    Mein Leipzig

    On June 29, 1912, Max Brod brought a shy, tongue-tied Franz Kafka to Leipzig to meet a daring young editor named Kurt Wolff. Wolff, then working for Rowohlt Verlag, read Kafka’s brief tales and published them before the year was out.

    Peter Hinke, a plump, cheerful Leipzig native, who founded the publishing house and bookstore Connewitzer Verlagsbuchhandlung in 1990, doesn’t claim to be another Kurt Wolff. These days, it’s impossible for a small publisher, armed only with a bike and a cell phone, to compete with the German conglomerates. But he’s doing all he can, fourteen hours a day, to

  • culture Dec/Jan 2008

    SAVAGE DETECTIVE

    In December 1996, the corrupt, discredited Guatemalan military and a decimated guerrilla army signed a peace accord, under United Nations supervision, ending thirty-six years of civil war. Less than two years later, the Guatemalan Archdiocese Office of Human Rights (known by the Spanish acronym odha) published a fourteen-hundred-page study of wartime atrocities, based on six thousand interviews conducted around the country with traumatized survivors and perpetrators of la violencia. This final report from the church’s Recovery of Historical Memory (remhi) investigations counted 150,000 dead

  • print Feb/Mar 2007

    Morocco Bound

    Algeria’s “war on terror” began in 1992, when a conclave of generals canceled the country’s first-ever democratic national elections to forestall an Islamist victory. Islamic extremists reacted to the brutal crackdown that ensued by taking up arms against the state for over a decade. Terrorist massacres, bombings and targeted assassinations, and the army’s dirty counterinsurgency campaign of torture, disappearances, and summary executions left two hundred thousand dead and many thousands missing.

    The violence galvanized a new generation of novelists; most ambitious and farreaching has been