Nobel Prize

With an array of work portraying the difficulties of life in Romania during the brutal Ceausescu dictatorship, Herta Müller was selected as the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Born into Romania's German minority, Müller started her luminous writing career -- sometimes penning works under clandestine conditions -- with a searing short story collection, Nadirs, and continued to publish essays, novels, and collections to critical acclaim. The Nobel Prize committee described Müller's work by noting that “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, [it] depicts the landscape of the dispossessed."

Noted French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio took home the Nobel Prize in 2008, already having garnered the Prix Renaudot in 1963 for Proces-Verbal and the first Grand Prix Paul-Morand in 1980. With an eye toward ecological issues and Western thought -- but more recently childhood and travel -- Le Clézio has been hailed by such literary luminaries as Michel Foucault and was described by the Nobel committee as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."

Acclaimed novelist Orhan Pamuk, who has been mentioned in the same breath as Marcel Proust, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gabriel García Márquez, shows he's just as skilled at nonfiction with Istanbul -- a mesmerizing memoir that weaves discussions of family lore, personal demons, literature, religion, art, and urban history into a fascinating portrait of one of the world's most complex cities.

Death etc. reveals Pinter's passions with poignant and powerful writings about war, from chilling psychological portraits of those who commit atrocities in the name of a higher power to solemn hymns commemorating the faceless masses that perish unrecognized.

Erika Knout's career comes to a dangerous head when she embraces the advances of her student in this riveting psychological novel.

A young man sets out to escort his mother to the safety of her home in the South African countryside but discovers that the violence of war follows wherever he goes.

Kertesz's 1975 debut novel, Fateless, is the first in a trilogy of books that reflect on the Holocaust. It is the harrowing tale of a 14-year-old boy who survives captivity in Auschwitz and Buchenwald and tries to reconcile himself to the events of his day and the torments he has experienced.

Perhaps Naipaul's most autobiographical work, this is the story of a writer's singular journey from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England.