The Great War gave birth to some of the twentieth century's most celebrated writing; from D. H. Lawrence to Siegfried Sassoon, the literature generated by the war is etched into collective memory. But it is in fiction that we find some of the most profound insights into the war's individual and communal tragedies, the horror of life in the trenches, and the grand farce of the first industrial war. Featuring forty-seven writers from twenty different nations, representing all the main participants in the conflict, No Man's Land is a truly international anthology of World War I fiction. Work by Erich Maria Remarque, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Rose Macaulay sits alongside forgotten masterpieces such as Stratis Myrivilis's Life in the Tomb, Raymond Escholier's Mahmadou Fofana, and Mary Borden's The Forbidden Zone. No Man's Land is a brilliant memorial to the twentieth century's most cataclysmic event.

Author Biography

Pete Ayrton was born in London in 1943. A period of work as translator led to a job as editor with Pluto Press and to his founding in 1986 of Serpent's Tail with the specific agenda of publishing fiction in translation; this includes two First World War classics, Frederic Manning's Her Privates We and Gabriel Chevallier's Fear, both represented in No Man's Land.