In chapter one, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. In chapter two, Tosca, her daughter (born in Canada, where her mother had emigrated) moves to the DDR and takes a job in the circus. Her son―the last of their line―is Knut, born in chapter three in a Leipzig zoo but raised by a human keeper in relatively happy circumstances in the Berlin zoo, until his keeper, Matthias, is taken away...Happy or sad, each bear writes a story, enjoying both celebrity and “the intimacy of being alone with my pen.”

    With masterly precision, Canetti reveals Kien's character, displaying the flawed personal relationships which ultimately lead to his destruction.Manipulated by his illiterate and grasping housekeeper, Therese, who has tricked him into marriage, and Benedikt Pfaff, a brutish concierge, Kien is forced out of his apartment - which houses his great library and one true passion - and into the underworld of the city. In this purgatory he is guided by a chess-playing dwarf of evil propensities, until he is eventually restored to his home. But on his return he is visited by his brother, an eminent psychiatrist who, by an error of diagnosis, precipitates the final crisis..."Auto-da-Fé" was first published in Germany in 1935 as "Die Blendung" ("The Blinding" or "Bedazzlement") and later in Britain in 1947, where the publisher noted Canetti as a 'writer of strongly individual genius, which may prove influential', an observation borne out when the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. "Auto-da-Fé" still towers as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and Canetti's incisive vision of an insular man battling agianst the outside world is as fresh and rewarding today as when first it appeared in print.

    Written in diary form, it tells the tale of an unhappy, passionate young man hopelessly in love with Charlotte, the wife of a friend - a man who he alternately admires and detests. 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' became an important part of the 'Sturm und Drang movement, and greatly influenced later 'Romanticism'. The work is semi-autobiographical - in 1772, two years before the novel was published, Goethe had passed through a similar tempestuous period, when he lost his heart to Charlotte Buff, who was at that time engaged to his friend Johann Christian Kestner.

    To prove he is who he claims to be, he confesses to three unsolved murders and recalls in great detail an adventuresome life in America and Mexico among cowboys and peasants, in back alleys and docks. He is consumed by "the morbid impulse to convince," but no one believes him. This is a harrowing account part Kafka, part Camus of the power of self-deception and the freedom that ultimately lies in self-acceptance. Simultaneously haunting and humorous, I'm Not Stiller has come to be recognized as "one of the major post-war works of fiction" and a masterpiece of German literature.

    The anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. A Woman in Berlin tells of the complex relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject--the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age or infirmity.

    The Last World is the story of a young man's quest for the exiled poet Ovid and the masterwork he has consigned to the flames. Ransmayr has created a visionary landscape, a transformed place where the ancient world meets the twentieth century. A metaphysical thriller both compelling and profound. The Last World draws the reader into a universe governed by the power of mythology, a world of decay on the brink of apocalypse. A novel about exile, censorship, and the destruction of the planet, this is a cultural and political fable that is blazingly topical, yet timeless.

    Recalling the works of W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin, and Rebecca Solnit, An Inventory of Losses is a beautiful evocation of twelve specific treasures that have been lost to the world forever, and that, taken as a whole, open mesmerizing new vistas of how to think about extinction and loss.With meticulous research and a vivid awareness of why we should care about these losses, Judith Schalansky, the acclaimed author of Atlas of Remote Islands, lets these objects speak for themselves: she ventriloquizes the tone of other sources, burrows into the language of contemporaneous accounts, and deeply interrogates the very notion of memory.

    He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew.” In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider.The genius of Imre Kertesz’s unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its events, not least of which is Georg’s dogmatic insistence on making sense of what he witnesses–or pretending that what he witnesses makes sense. Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment, Fatelessness is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.

    Adolf Hitler wakes up from a 66-year sleep in his subterranean Berlin bunker to find the Germany he knew entirely changed: Internet-driven media spreads ideas in minutes and fumes celebrity obsession; immigration has produced multicultural neighborhoods bringing together people of varying race, ethnicity, and religion; and the most powerful person in government is a woman. Hitler is immediately recognized . . . as an impersonator of uncommon skill. The public assumes the fulminating leader of the Nazi party is a performer who is always in character, and soon his inevitable viral appeal begets YouTube stardom, begets television celebrity on a Turkish-born comedian's show. His bigoted rants are mistaken for a theatrical satire--exposing prejudice and misrepresentation--and his media success emboldens Hitler to start his own political party and set the country he finds a shambles back to rights. With daring and dark humor, Look Who's Back skewers the absurdity and depravity of the cult of personality in modern media culture.

    The desertion triggers a searing re-examination of his life—the loss of his sister during the war, the demands of his millionaire father and the hypocrisies of his mother, who first fought to “save” Germany from the Jews, then worked for “reconciliation” afterwards.

    In Schneider's Berlin, real people cross the Wall not to defect but to quarrel with their lovers, see Hollywood movies, and sometimes just because they can't help themselves—the Wall has divided their emotions as much as it has their country."An honest, rich book. . . . It is one those rare books that come back at odd moments to intrude on your comfortable conclusions and easy images."—Robert Houston, Nation

    The red-headed prostitute Rosina; the junk-dealer Aaron Wassertrum; puppeteers; street musicians; and a deaf-mute silhouette artist.Lurking in its inhabitants’ subconscious is the Golem, a creature of rabbinical myth. Supposedly a manifestation of all the suffering of the ghetto, it comes to life every 33 years in a room without a door. When the jeweller Athanasius Pernath, suffering from broken dreams and amnesia, sees the Golem, he realises to his terror that the ghostly man of clay shares his own face...The Golem, though rarely seen, is central to the novel as a representative of the ghetto's own spirit and consciousness, brought to life by the suffering and misery that its inhabitants have endured over the centuries. Perhaps the most memorable figure in the story is the city of Prague itself, recognisable through its landmarks such as the Street of the Alchemists and the Castle.

    First published in 1930, Hesse's novel remains a moving and pointed exploration of the conflict between the life of the spirit and the life of the flesh. It is a theme that transcends all time.

    But Tanja's act of academic rebellion incites the rage of one renegade member of her class—and pulls her dangerously close to another—which, in turn, exacerbates the tensions of a life in exile that has now begun to spiral seriously out of control.

    At the war’s end, Frankfurt was a smoldering ruin, severely damaged by the Allied bombings. But that was two decades ago. Now it is 1963, and the city’s streets, once cratered are smooth and paved. Shiny new stores replace scorched rubble. Eager for her wealthy suitor, Jürgen Schoormann, to propose, Eva dreams of starting a new life away from her parents and sister. But Eva’s plans are turned upside down when a fiery investigator, David Miller, hires her as a translator for a war crimes trial.As she becomes more deeply involved in the Frankfurt Trials, Eva begins to question her family’s silence on the war and her future. Why do her parents refuse to talk about what happened? What are they hiding? Does she really love Jürgen and will she be happy as a housewife? Though it means going against the wishes of her family and her lover, Eva, propelled by her own conscience , joins a team of fiery prosecutors determined to bring the Nazis to justice—a decision that will help change the present and the past of her nation.