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© 2003,Uwe Timm (Headhunter, The Invention of Curried Sausage) has been described in The New Yorker as an extraordinary storyteller. In this early novel, he focuses his narrative talents on the historical conflict between German colonists and African tribes under the leadership of the legendary Morenga in the first decade of the 20th century. A daring and brilliant military tactician, Morenga was fluent in several languages and by all reports a man of compassion, intelligence, and integrity, as he led his people towards freedom. Recounted through the eyes of Gottschalk, an engaging fictional military veterinarian, the narrative blends quotations from historical sources with actual accounts of everyday life and military excursions. The parallels between past events and later German history, with its notions of the Untermensch (subhuman beings) and racial inferiortiy, are subtly brought to mind, while significant philosophical, political, and human issues are at play. Morenga is an intriguing novel of scope and significance, and it has been well served by Breon Mitchell's prize-winning translation. -
© 2013,Winner of the PEN Translation Prize Unavailable to English readers for more than 50 years, The Island of Second Sight is a masterpiece of world literature. Set in the years leading up to World War II, it is the fictionalized account of the time spent in Mallorca by the author and his wife, who encounter the most unpredictable and surreal adventures, pursued all the while by Nazis and Francoists. And just as the chaos comes to seem manageable, the Spanish Civil War erupts. Drawing comparisons to Don Quixote and The Man Without Qualities, The Island of Second Sight is a novel of astonishing and singular richness of language and purpose. At once ironic and humanistic, hilarious and profoundly serious, philosophical and grotesque, The Island of Second Sight is a literary tour de force.
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© 2005,"Absolutely stunning."-- Times Literary Supplement "This remarkable, superbly translated novel derives from the life of the real 19th century explorer John Franklin...[whose] adventures are conveyed with spellbinding skill."-- Publishers Weekly The Discovery of Slowness --a huge commercial and critical success across Europe, where it is considered the popular author''s masterpiece--recounts the life of the nineteenth-century British explorer Sir John Franklin (1786-1847). Through the author''s acute reading of history and his marvelous storytelling prowess, the reader follows John Franklin''s development from awkward schoolboy and ridiculed teenager to expedition leader, governor of Tasmania, and icon of adventure. Slow and deliberate from boyhood, Franklin appeared destined to be a misfit. But he escaped from the ever-expanding world of industry and Empire to the sea''s silent landscape, where the universe seemed more manageable. At age fourteen he joined the navy. After surviving the harrowing battles of Copenhagen and Trafalgar, he embarked on several voyages of discovery into the Canadian North, and served as governor of Van Diemen''s Land (now Tasmania). Everyone with whom he came into contact sensed that Franklin was a rare man, one who was "out of his time" and who moved to a different, grander beat. That beat eventually led Franklin to sail once more--on his final, fateful voyage--into the Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage. The Discovery of Slowness is a riveting account of a remarkable and varied life. And it is also a profound and thought-provoking meditation on time. The result is an unforgettable and deeply moving reading experience that justifies the novel''s reputation as one of the classics of contemporary world literature. *** "Nadolny evinces remarkable empathy with his unlikely Odysseus and Ralph Freedman''s translation captures the crystalline freshness of the author''s imagery."-- Washington Post Book World " The Discovery of Slowness is a masterpiece of characterization, a portrait of inwardness in the most outward-thrusting of lives."-- The New Republic "Fluid and suspenseful, a thought-provoking reminder of contemporary society''s tendency to speed through everyday life."-- The Providence Journal-Bulletin "Amazing...His book is a historical painting, a seafarer''s novel, a love story, an outcast''s story all in one. This variety appears very harmonious, just as it incidentally, almost secretly, reflects on our right to discover the world at our own, personal pace."-- Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung "Sir John Franklin is the embodied contrast to the frenetic agitation of the modern world. The discovery of slowness is the slowness of discovery."-- New York Review of Books "Nadolny''s vision is conveyed with restraint and charm...He has written a Utopia of character."-- New York Times Book Review "Its appeal lies in its observation of the texture of life, seen by a character who has to work everything out from first principles. It needs to be read slowly, to be absorbed as much as understood."-- Scotland On Sunday "This is more than an adventure; it''s a meditation on time and perception...Not to be rushed, or forgotten."-- The Herald "Nadolny brilliantly sets the narrative pace to the rhythms of the frozen landscape, and to the ''slowness which is bred by hunger.''"--Robert MacFarlane "This is both a wonderful historical novel and a spell-binding individual portrait...This is a marvellous translation of a masterly work."-- The Observer Sten Nadolny (b. 1942) was an historian and filmmaker, before writing four novels and two collections of essays. He lives in Berlin and has been awarded four prizes: Ingeborg Bachmann (1981), Hans-Fallada (1985), Premio Vallombrosa (1986), Ernst Hoferichter (1995). The Discovery of Slowness (1983) has been translated into all major languages.
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© 2004,This is the first collection of plays available in the UK by Germany's most famous living playwright. Spanning his work from 1972-94, the volume contains six of his most representative plays, some of which have been produced to great acclaim in this country. Request Concert (1972) is an extraordinary silent play which shows the last moments in a woman's life before her suicide; The Nest (1975) shows the fatal action that an employee takes in order to fulfil the wishes of an employer; Tom Fool (1977) the story of an insecure Munich assembly-line worker, was a huge success, having its world premiere in four simultaneous productions in 1978; Through the Leaves (1978): 'This is an astonishing event, a reminder of the potency of realism. At a time when style tends to dominate content, it proves that nothing is more gripping in theatre than social, psychological and economic truth' ( Guardian , 2003); Desire (1994) deals with the last of all taboos, a serial sex offender's release after many years. Praise for Through the Leaves , produced in London's West End in 2003 starring Simon Callow: 'A gripping and convincing study of emotional need' Sunday Telegraph ; 'A contemporary German classic' Evening Standard
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© 1997,This book offers a concise introduction to Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan. The work is approached both through its context and through a close reading of key passages of the text. The contextual reading compares Gottfried with his predecessors Beroul, Eilhart and Thomas in order to reveal his independent response to the problems and possibilities with which he was confronted by his material. The close textual reading builds up a distinctive interpretation of the work, in which particular attention is paid to Gottfried's reworking of literary tradition, his use of religious analogies, and his awareness of the fictive potential of literary language. A concluding chapter examines Gottfried's medieval reception through the work of his continuators, Ulrich von Turheim and Heinrich von Freiberg, and the Herzmaere of Konrad von Würzburg.
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© 2006,I sin frihed fra mand og arbejde engageres Rosalind til at skrive en gammel partifunktionærs erindringer fra DDR. Hun genoplever sin egen barndom, og raseriet og oprøret ulmer i hende...
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© 2009,Sergeant Gauthier Bachmann is the perfect Nazi soldier. But after a horrifying defeat at Voroshenko, where most of his Eighth Hessian Infantry Regiment was slaughtered in a single instant, Bachmann was declared mentally unfit to serve. Incapable of accepting this judgment, and of returning to his girlfriend and a quiet life as a gold- and silversmith, Bachmann wanders the war-ravaged countryside, trying to find a way to rejoin his regiment, or any regiment, and return to the front. Whilst wandering he is tormented by a series of figures from the underbelly of war.
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© 1991,An English translation of a post-war German classic. The events of this novel take place during the course of a single day in an unnamed city in occupied Germany where the endless drone of allied planes overhead increases the already heightened tension.
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© 2002,Included in this anthology are: --Farmyard by Franz Xaver Kroetz--Offending the Audience by Peter Handke--Eve of Retirement by Thomas Bernhard--Big and Little by Botho Strauss
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© 2014,Sarah Kirsch, who died in May 2013, was one of Germany's most acclaimed contemporary poets. Having lived and worked first in East Germany, then (following political persecution) in the West, finally making her home in rural Schleswig-Holstein, Kirsch provides a writer's-eye perspective on Germany's varied post-war existences. Although rarely overtly political, her poetry, with its free-flowing syntax and fluid sound patterning, bespeaks her lifelong resistance to constraint and convention.
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© 2010,"Vermutlich war Gert Jonke eine der letzten wahrhaftigen Dichter-Existenzen unter den deutschsprachigen Autoren: Sein Leben und Schreiben war eine untrennbare Einheit. Aber Gert Jonke als Lyriker? Ist da eine neue Seite an dem Sprachzauberer zu entdecken? Ja und nein. Das poetische Universum dieses Dichters kannte bekanntlich keine Gattungen und keine Grenzen. So sind viele der Chorlieder und Zorn-Arien, der Anrufungen und Gesprächsduette in seinen Theaterstücken unverkennbar lyrische Gesänge. Das hat auch sein Publikum so wahrgenommen. Hier erscheinen diese Kleinodien neben den originären Gedichten in einem neuen Kontext. Und -- beinahe ist es schon in Vergessenheit geraten: Gert Jonke hat schließlich als Lyriker begonnen. Seine ersten Veröffentlichungen, als Sechzehn- und Siebzehnjähriger, waren Gedichte -- bis sein Vormund ihm das Schreiben und Veröffentlichen verboten hat. Das Verbot hat nicht lang gehalten, und Gert Jonke hat weiter Gedichte geschrieben, hat sie in Sammelbänden publiziert oder hat sie in seine Stücke, seine Prosa und seine Essays hineingezaubert. In diesem Buch wird der Schatz gehoben."--Book jacket.
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© 2014,The renowned scholar Rüdiger Safranski's Romanticism: A German Affair both offers an accessible overview of Romanticism and, more critically, traces its lasting influence, for better and for ill, on German culture. Safranski begins with the eighteenthcentury Sturm und Drang movement, which would sow the seeds for Romanticism in Germany. While Romanticism was a broad artistic, literary, and intellectual movement, German thinkers were especially concerned with its strong philosophical-metaphysical and religious dimension. Safranski follows this spirit in its afterlife in the work of Heinrich Heine, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and through the later artistic upheavals of the twentieth century. He concludes by carefully considering Romanticism's possible influence in the rise of National Socialism and the student revolt of 1968. Romanticism: A German Affair is essential reading for anyone interested in the power of art, culture, and ideas in the life of a nation.
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© 2014,The End of Days, a brilliant novel of contingency and fate, by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five "books," each leading to a different death of the same unnamed woman protagonist. How could it all have gone differently? the narrator asks in the intermezzos. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna, but her strange relationship with a boy leads to death. In the next scenario, she survives adolescence and moves to Russia with her husband. Both are dedicated Communists, yet our heroine ends up in a labor camp. But her fate does not end there... A novel of incredible breadth yet amazing concision, The End of Days offers a unique overview of twentieth-century German and German-Jewish history by "one of the finest, most exciting authors alive" (Michael Faber).
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© 2007,Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene. Young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann's brilliant comic novel revolves around the meeting of two colossal geniuses of the Enlightenment. Late in the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. One of them, the aristocratic naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, negotiates jungles, voyages down the Orinoco River, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores and measures every cave and hill he comes across. The other, the reclusive and barely socialized mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, can prove that space is curved without leaving his home. Terrifyingly famous and wildly eccentric, these two polar opposites finally meet in Berlin in 1828, and are immediately embroiled in the turmoil of the post-Napolean world.
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© 2015,"There are books that are suitable for a million people, others for only a hundred. There are even remedies--I mean books--that were written for one person only...A book is both medic and medicine at once. It makes a diagnosis as well as offering therapy. Putting the right novels to the appropriate ailments: that's how I sell books." Monsieur Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary. From his floating bookstore in a barge on the Seine, he prescribes novels for the hardships of life. Using his intuitive feel for the exact book a reader needs, Perdu mends broken hearts and souls. The only person he can't seem to heal through literature is himself; he's still haunted by heartbreak after his great love disappeared. She left him with only a letter, which he has never opened. After Perdu is finally tempted to read the letter, he hauls anchor and departs on a mission to the south of France, hoping to make peace with his loss and discover the end of the story. Joined by a bestselling but blocked author and a lovelorn Italian chef, Perdu travels along the country's rivers, dispensing his wisdom and his books, showing that the literary world can take the human soul on a journey to heal itself. Internationally bestselling and filled with warmth and adventure, The Little Paris Bookshop is a love letter to books, meant for anyone who believes in the power of stories to shape people's lives.
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© 2015,"There are books that are suitable for a million people, others for only a hundred. There are even remedies--I mean books--that were written for one person only...A book is both medic and medicine at once. It makes a diagnosis as well as offering therapy. Putting the right novels to the appropriate ailments: that's how I sell books." Monsieur Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary. From his floating bookstore in a barge on the Seine, he prescribes novels for the hardships of life. Using his intuitive feel for the exact book a reader needs, Perdu mends broken hearts and souls. The only person he can't seem to heal through literature is himself; he's still haunted by heartbreak after his great love disappeared. She left him with only a letter, which he has never opened. After Perdu is finally tempted to read the letter, he hauls anchor and departs on a mission to the south of France, hoping to make peace with his loss and discover the end of the story. Joined by a bestselling but blocked author and a lovelorn Italian chef, Perdu travels along the country's rivers, dispensing his wisdom and his books, showing that the literary world can take the human soul on a journey to heal itself. Internationally bestselling and filled with warmth and adventure, The Little Paris Bookshop is a love letter to books, meant for anyone who believes in the power of stories to shape people's lives.
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© 2007,A group of poems from the core member of the Vienna Group and one of Europe's most intrepid avant-garde writers, this collection contains more than 300 poems from seven decades of writing. The poems are true to the legacies of romanticism and surrealism and exhibit the poet's ability to push the limits of convention to reveal a deeper structure of existence, ranging from elation to abyss.