In politics there's absolutely nothing new. Again, out of impatience I feel myself beginning to fall into melancholy. There is really no way out of this for us." This is Dawid Sierakowiak's final diary entry. Soon after writing it, the young author died of tuberculosis, exhaustion, and starvation―the Holocaust syndrome known as "ghetto disease." After the liberation of the Lodz Ghetto, his notebooks were found stacked on a cookstove, ready to be burned for heat. Young Sierakowiak was one of more than 60,000 Jews who perished in that notorious urban slave camp, a man-made hell which was the longest surviving concentration of Jews in Nazi Europe. The diary comprises a remarkable legacy left to humanity by its teenage author. It is one of the most fastidiously detailed accounts ever rendered of modern life in human bondage. Off mountain climbing and studying in southern Poland during the summer of 1939, Dawid begins his diary with a heady enthusiasm to experience life, learn languages, and read great literature. He returns home under the quickly gathering clouds of war. Abruptly Lodz is occupied by the Nazis, and the Sierakowiak family is among the city's 200,000 Jews who are soon forced into a sealed ghetto, completely cut off from the outside world. With intimate, undefended prose, the diary's young author begins to describe the relentless horror of their predicament: his daily struggle to obtain food to survive; trying to make reason out of a world gone mad; coping with the plagues of death and deportation. Repeatedly he rallies himself against fear and pessimism, fighting the cold, disease, and exhaustion which finally consume him. Physical pain and emotional woe hold him constantly at the edge of endurance. Hunger tears Dawid's family apart, turning his father into a thief who steals bread from his wife and children. The wonder of the diary is that every bit of hardship yields wisdom from Dawid's remarkable intellect. Reading it, you become a prisoner with him in the ghetto, and with discomfiting intimacy you begin to experience the incredible process by which the vast majority of the Jews of Europe were annihilated in World War II. Significantly, the youth has no doubt about the consequence of deportation out of the ghetto: "Deportation into lard," he calls it. A committed communist and the unit leader of an underground organization, he crusades for more food for the ghetto's school children. But when invited to pledge his life to a suicide resistance squad, he writes that he cannot become a "professional revolutionary." He owes his strength and life to the care of his family.

    These objects—a cigarette lighter, lollipop sticks, a beer-bottle opener, etc.—like the fictional pieces of the novel itself, are seemingly random at first, but eventually coalesce, meaningfully and poetically.Written in a variety of literary forms, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender captures the shattered world of living in exile. Some chapters re-create the daily journal of the narrator's lonely and alienated mother, who shops at the improvised flea-markets in town and longs for her children; another is a dream-like narrative in which a circle of women friends are visited by an angel. There are reflections and accounts of the Holocaust and the Yugoslav Civil War; portraits of European artists; a recipe for Caraway Soup; a moving story of a romantic encounter the narrator has in Lisbon; descriptions of family photographs; memories of the small town in which Ugresic was raised.Addressing the themes of art and history, aging and loss, The Museum is a haunting and an extremely original novel. In the words of the Times Literary Supplement, "it is vivid in its denunciation of destructive forces and in its evocation of what is at stake."

    This is a book for anybody who likes to play with their food! It includes split pages so you can make up lots of very surprising meals!

    (Version 1)* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Shelley's life and works* Concise introductions to the novels and other texts* ALL 7 novels, with individual contents tables* Images of how the books were first printed, giving your eReader a taste of the original gothic works* Includes both the original 1818 version of FRANKENSTEIN and the revised 1831 version* Special bonus text of Peake's famous play adaptation of FRANKENSTEIN, giving a flavour of the novel's immediate popularity* Excellent formatting of the texts* Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the poetry and the short stories* Easily locate the poems or short stories you want to read* Features rare short stories and poems appearing here for the first time in digital print* The complete travel books appear here for the first time in digital publishing* Includes Shelley's letters - spend hours exploring the author’s personal correspondence* Features two biographies - discover Shelley's literary life* Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genresCONTENTS:The NovelsFRANKENSTEIN (1818 version)FRANKENSTEIN (1831 version)MATHILDAVALPERGATHE LAST MANTHE FORTUNES OF PERKIN WARBECKLODOREFALKNERThe Short StoriesLIST OF SHORT STORIES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDERLIST OF SHORT STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDERThe Children’s FictionPROSERPINEMIDASThe PoemsLIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDERLIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDERThe Travel WritingHISTORY OF A SIX WEEKS’ TOUR THROUGH A PART OF FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, GERMANY, AND HOLLANDRAMBLES IN GERMANY AND ITALY, IN 1840, 1842, AND 1843The Non-FictionNOTES TO THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEYAn AdaptationTHE FATE OF FRANKENSTEIN by Richard Brinsley PeakeThe BiographiesTHE LIFE AND LETTERS OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY by Florence A. Thomas MarshallMRS. SHELLEY by Lucy M. Rossetti

    Intrigue and heroism, adventure and betrayal figure in this account of British-led efforts to defeat the Nazis in wartime France, based on extensive research in records, documents, letters and memoirs, and the author's interviews with surviving agents and officials. Despite sporadic defeat and betrayal, SOE leaders managed to delay the arrival of German reinforcements to the Normandy beachhead, contributing to the eventual Allied victory. Details of the operations of SOE recounted here remained secret for decades after the war, finally revealing the human cost of the reconnaissance and sabotage efforts that helped to shorten the conflict.

    Most died at Auschwitz. Two thousand of those Jews, however, had non-Jewish partners and were locked into a collection center on a street called Rosenstrasse. As news of the surprise arrest pulsed through the city, hundreds of Gentile spouses, mostly women, hurried to the Rosenstrasse in protest. A chant broke out: "Give us our husbands back."Over the course of a week protesters vied with the Gestapo for control of the street. Now and again armed SS guards sent the women scrambling for cover with threats that they would shoot. After a week the Gestapo released these Jews, almost all of whom survived the war.The Rosenstrasse Protest was the triumphant climax of ten years of resistance by intermarried couples to Nazi efforts to destroy their families. In fact, ninety-eight percent of German Jews who did not go into hiding and who survived Nazism lived in mixed marriages. Why did Hitler give in to the protesters? Using interviews with survivors and thousands of Nazi records never before examined in detail, Nathan Stoltzfus identifies the power of a special type of resistance--the determination to risk one's own life for the life of loved ones. A "resistance of the heart..."

    This ambitious and exciting book focuses on writers and works that are intimately bound up with a place and a time, capturing a town, a city, a region, in its literary heyday.