Books from Luxembourg

Luxembourg is the only Grand Duchy in the world, a small country where several languages overlap and where older rural traditions sit alongside a modern international economy. This book pairs regional recipes from Ketty Thull with atmospheric photography by Carlo Sauber and text by Carole Theisen, moving through the country's varied landscapes, from historic town alleyways to the vineyards along the Moselle and wilder stretches of forest and rock.

The recipes cover well-known dishes from Luxembourgish home cooking. Gromperekichelcher, crisp pan-fried potato cakes seasoned with onion and parsley, appear alongside choucroute, the slow-cooked cabbage and meat preparation shared with neighboring Alsace and parts of Germany. Schuedi, a traditional braised meat dish, is also featured. These are foods tied to local ingredients and seasons rather than restaurant presentation.

Photographs document each region's character, pairing food with the places where it developed. The book treats Luxembourg's small geographic scale as a source of variety rather than limitation, showing how distinct landscapes and local traditions fit within a country roughly 80 kilometers from north to south.

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On May 10, 1940, twelve-year-old Marguerite Thill, known as Gretchen, was woken by her father's warning that Nazi forces were about to cross into Luxembourg. By that evening, Gretchen, her three sisters, and their parents had pulled on multiple layers of clothing and joined hundreds of others fleeing on foot toward France. What followed was three months as refugees: hunger, lice, nights in barns, and stretches crouching in ditches as bombs fell nearby.

The family was eventually moved to Montbard, in the Burgundy region of France, and lodged with two elderly women. A brief sense of stability ended when they were relocated to Cruchy, a small village where they moved into a house that had stood empty since the First World War. German soldiers soon took over part of the building, pitching tents in the orchard. Gretchen's father began sleeping with an axe beside him, his only means of protecting his wife and four daughters from the commander quartered next door.

Written from the vantage point of a child, the account records displacement in plain practical terms: what the family carried, where they slept, and how parents tried to hold a household together while borders, authority, and daily routines shifted around them from one week to the next.

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The Pleasure of Drowning is a debut short story collection by Jean Bürlesk that reworks legends and fairy tales. The stories revisit familiar narrative paths, from well-known European tales to older folk sources, but reshape them with irony and satirical observation. Rather than retelling these stories faithfully, Bürlesk uses their structures as starting points for something sharper and less comfortable.

The collection sits at the border between fantasy and social commentary. Fairy tales, as the book treats them, are not only inherited narratives but patterns that repeat in ordinary life. Bürlesk writes with a tone that mixes unease and dark humor, pulling the fantastical into territory that feels pointed and contemporary. The familiar comfort of a fairy tale framework is present, but the stories push against it steadily.

Jean Bürlesk is from Luxembourg, and this collection won the Prix d'Encouragement de la Fondation Servais in 2019, a literary prize awarded in that country. Luxembourg's literary scene operates across several languages, and its writers often move between French, German, Luxembourgish, and English. The Pleasure of Drowning represents one example of Luxembourgish writing reaching an English-language readership.

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