But what happens to human feeling in a completely commodified world? In The Post-Office Girl, Stefan Zweig, a deep analyst of the human passions, lays bare the private life of capitalism.Christine toils in a provincial post office in post–World War I Austria, a country gripped by unemployment. Out of the blue, a telegram arrives from Christine’s rich American aunt inviting her to a resort in the Swiss Alps. Christine is immediately swept up into a world of inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire. She feels herself utterly transformed: nothing is impossible. But then, abruptly, her aunt cuts her loose. Christine returns to the post office, where yes, nothing will ever be the same again.Christine meets Ferdinand, a bitter war veteran and disappointed architect, who works construction jobs when he can get them. They are drawn to each other, even as they are crushed by a sense of deprivation, of anger and shame. Work, politics, love, sex: everything is impossible for them. Life is meaningless, unless, through one desperate and decisive act, they can secretly remake their world from within.Cinderella meets Bonnie and Clyde in Zweig’s haunting and hard-as-nails novel, completed during the 1930s, as he was driven by the Nazis into exile, but left unpublished at the time of his death. The Post-Office Girl, available here for the first time in English, transforms our image of a modern master’s achievement.

    Sebald; an amalgam, as Susan Sontag suggests in her preface to this volume, of Stevie Smith and Samuel Beckett.This collection gathers forty-two of Walser's stories. Encompassing everything from journal entries, notes on literature, and biographical sketches to anecdotes, fables, and visions, it is an ideal introduction to this fascinating writer of whom Hermann Hesse famously declared, "If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place."Response to a RequestFlower DaysTrousersTwo Strange StoriesBalloon JourneyKleist in ThumThe Job ApplicationThe BoatA Little RambleHelbling's StoryThe Little BerlinerNervousThe WalkSo! "I've Got You"Nothing at AllKienastPoestsFrau WilkeThe StreetSnowdropsWinterThe She-OwlKnockingTitusVladimirParisian NewspapersThe MonkeyDostoevsky's IdiotAm I Dreaming?The Little TreeStork and PorcupineA Contribution to the Celebration of Conrad Ferdinand MeyerA Sort of SpeechA Letter to Therese BreitbachA Village TaleThe AviatorThe PimpMasters and WorkersEssay on FreedomA Biedermeier StoryThe HoneymoonThoughts on Cezanne

    K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin.Volume I - Swann's Way, Within A Budding Grove.Volume II - The Guermantes Way, Cities Of The Plain.Volume III - The Captive, The Fugitive, Time Regained.

    Now she has returned home to die. While that process takes place she replays the fragments of her past. And, as the Christmas tree awaits its day, so she also waits, hoping that the outcome will be on her terms.

    The tenth volume of Tove and Lars Jansson's classic comic strip features the macabre and hilarious "Moomin and the Vampire" and "The Underdeveloped Moomins." Together, the four stories in this collection display the poignancy, whimsy, and philosophical bent that constitute the Moomins' enduring appeal.

    In its analytical profundity it can be compared to his Philosophy of Modern Music, but in the range of its topics and the clarity of its arguments it stands alone among Adorno’s writings on music. At the book’s core are illuminating studies of the founders of modern music: Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg, as well as sympathetic rediscoveries of Alexander Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker. Especially significant is Adorno’s “dialectical portrait” of Stravinsky in which he both reconsiders and refines the damning indictment he gave in Philosophy on Modern Music. In ‘Vers une musique informelle’, an influential essay, he plots a course for a music of the future ‘which takes up the challenge of an unrevised, unrestricted freedom’. More unexpectedly, there are moving accounts of earlier works, including Bizet’s Carmen and Weber’s Der Freischutz, along with an entertainingly caustic “Natural History of the Theatre.” Which explores the hierarchies of the auditorium, from upper circle to foyer.‘The positive element of kitsch’, Adorno remarks, ‘lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.’ Musical kitsch is the target of several of the shorter pieces: on Gounod’s Ave Maria or Tchaikovsky’s ‘clumsy naivety’; on the ‘Penny Serenade’ of the transformation of Mozart into chocolate-box rococo. Yet even while Adorno demolishes ‘commodity music’ he is sustained by the conviction that music is supremely human because it retains the capacity to speak of inhumanity and to resist it. It is a conviction which reverberates throughout these writings. For Adorno, music and philosophy were inextricably linked: Quasi una Fantasia will enlarge our understanding of both.