Suzanne Ruta

• Fiction January 1, 1
• Culture January 1, 1

  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 and 50,000 dis­appeared and held the military primarily responsible. Its recommendations were no less powerful for
• Culture January 1, 1

  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.