Narrated in a series of stark, brief vignettes, The Illiterate is Agota Kristof's memoir of her childhood, her escape from Hungary in 1956 with her husband and small child, her early years working in factories in Switzerland, and the writing of her first novel, The Notebook. Few writers can convey so much in so little space. Fierce yet almost pointedly flat and documentarian in tone, Kristof portrays with a disturbing level of detail and directness an implacable message of loss: first, she is forced to learn Russian as a child (with the Soviet takeover of Hungary, Russian became obligatory at school); next, at age 21, she finds herself required to learn French to survive: It is in this way that, at the age of twenty-one, when I arrive in Switzerland and when, completely by chance, I arrive in a city where French is spoken, I confront a language that is totally unknown to me. It is here that my battle to conquer this language begins, a long and arduous battle that will last my entire life. I have spoken French for more than thirty years, I have written in French for twenty years, but I still don't know it. I don't speak it without mistakes, and I can only write it with the help of dictionaries, which I frequently consult. It is for this reason that I also call the French language an enemy language. There is a further reason, the most serious of all: this language is killing my mother tongue.

Nina Bogin's Thousandfold is a journey through seasons and landscapes, a journal of ordinary life punctuated by extra-ordinary people and moments - the births of grandchildren, the physical decline of a husband, relationships with family and friends. Her poems connect the unknowable past of ancestors to the equally unfathomable future of descendants, between which there fluctuates a present that is no less elusive, even as the poet gives it a structure in language. If life is full of uncertainties, our world at once threatened and threatening, then what brings constancy, hope, solace? Bogin's intimate, exploratory poems take on greater poignancy as the author faces the subject of her husband's dementia and begins to find her way into a life both with and without him.