Set in an unnamed German-occupied ghetto, the story centers on an unlikely hero, Jakob Heym, who accidentally overhears news of vital importance: the Russians are advancing on a city three hundred miles away. As Jakob's tidings rekindle hope and the promise of liberation, he feels compelled to elaborate. Forming a protective bond with a young orphan girl, Jakob becomes caught in his own web of optimistic lies. Awarded Germany's prestigious Heinrich Mann Prize for fiction and in a new translation by Leila Vennewitz, Jakob the Liar is a masterpiece of Kafkaesque comedy which unfolds with the impact of a timeless folk legend.

    It reads the city as palimpsest and labyrinth, revealing unexpected lyricism in the heart of the familiar.As an added gem, a preface by Howard Eiland discusses the genesis and structure of the work, which marks the culmination of Benjamin's attempt to do philosophy concretely.

    The novella tells the story of a day in the meticulously ordered life of bank security guard Jonathan Noel, who has been hiding from life since his wife left him for her Tunisian lover. When Jonathan opens his front door on a day he believes will be just like any other, he encounters not the desired empty hallway but an unwelcome, diabolical intruder . . .

    But this play-within-a-play is not historical drama. Its thought is as modern as today's police states and The Bomb; its theatrical impact has everywhere been called a major innovation. It is total theatre: philosophically problematic, visually terrifying. It engages the eye, the ear, and the mind with every imaginable dramatic device, technique, and stage picture, even including song and dance. All the forces and elements possible to the stage are fused in one overwhelming experience. This is theatre such as has rarely been seen before. The play is basically concerned with the problem of revolution. Are the same things true for the masses and for their leaders? And where, in modern times, lie the borderlines of sanity?

    After deciding the wrong man has been arrested for the crime, the detective lays a trap for the real killer—with all the patience of a master fisherman. But cruel turns of plot conspire to make him pay dearly for his pledge. Here Friedrich Dürrenmatt conveys his brilliant ear for dialogue and a devastating sense of timing and suspense. Joel Agee’s skilled translation effectively captures the various voices in the original, as well as its chilling conclusion.One of Dürrenmatt’s most diabolically imagined and constructed novels, The Pledge was adapted for the screen in 2000 in a film directed by Sean Penn and starring Jack Nicholson.

    Shooting parties in great country houses, turbulent scenes in parliament, and the luxury of life in Budapest provide the backdrop for this gripping, prescient novel, forming a chilling indictment of upper-class frivolity and political folly, in which good manners cloak indifference and brutality. Abady becomes aware of the plight of a group of Romanian mountain peasants and champions their cause, while Gyeroffy dissipates his resources at the gaming tables, mirroring the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself. The first book in a trilogy published before World War II, it was rediscovered after the fall of Communism in Hungary and this edition contains a new foreword.

    It is a profound and powerful look at a totalitarian state which comes to inhabit every aspect of life; to the extent that everyone, even the most strongest, must either bend to the oppressors, or resist them and perish.

    Christine is a serious soul from a devout background. She is brooding and beautiful and devoted to her husband and their two children. Helmut is lighthearted and pleasure-loving and largely content to defer to his wife’s deeper feelings and better wisdom. They live in a beautiful large house overlooking the sea, which they built themselves, and have been happily married for twenty-three years—only of late a certain tension has crept into their dealings with each other. Little jokes, casual endearments, long-meditated plans: they all hit a raw nerve.How a couple can slowly drift apart, until one day they find themselves in a situation which is nothing they ever wished for but from which they cannot go back, is at the heart of this timeless story of everyday life. Theodor Fontane’s great gift is to tell the story effectively in his characters’ own words, listening to how they talk and fail to talk to each other, watching them turn away from their own true feelings as much as from each other. Irretrievable is a nuanced, affectionate, enormously sophisticated, and profoundly humane reckoning with the blindness of love.

    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 experience 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.Praise for The Island of Second Sight"A masterpiece...Fabulous in all senses of the word." —Iain Bamforth, Times Literary Supplement"A genuine work of art." —Paul Celan"[The Island of Second Sight] is comparable in profundity as well as in complexity to Mann's own Magic Mountain. It is in a class with two other massive German masterpieces...: Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil and Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities." —Allen Guttmann, Amherst Magazine"There is a widely held misconception that Germans have no sense of humor. Here is evidence to the contrary as Thelen, belatedly, through his translator, gets a chance to show the English speaking world." —Anthea Bell, Literary Review

    He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology, and horoscope. When he died in 1935, Pessoa left behind a trunk filled with unfinished and unpublished writings, among which were the remarkable pages that make up his posthumous masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, an astonishing work that, in George Steiner's words, "gives to Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce's Dublin or Kafka's Prague." Published for the first time some fifty years after his death, this unique collection of short, aphoristic paragraphs comprises the "autobiography" of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa's alternate selves. Part intimate diary, part prose poetry, part descriptive narrative, captivatingly translated by Richard Zenith, The Book of Disquiet is one of the greatest works of the twentieth century.

    It is the answer he gave his wife (now ex-wife) years earlier when she told him she wanted one. The loss, longing and regret that haunt the years between those two “no”s give rise to one of the most eloquent meditations ever written on the Holocaust. As Kertesz’s narrator addresses the child he couldn’t bear to bring into the world he ushers readers into the labyrinth of his consciousness, dramatizing the paradoxes attendant on surviving the catastrophe of Auschwitz. Kaddish for the Unborn Child is a work of staggering power, lit by flashes of perverse wit and fueled by the energy of its wholly original voice. Translated by Tim Wilkinson

    Here is a novel which inquires: What if your id (loyally keeping your name) decides to strike out on its own, cuts a disreputable swath through the world, and then sends home to you all its unpaid bills and ruined maidens? And then: What if you and your alter ego decide to write a book together?

    With the exception of his three novels, the whole of Kafka’s narrative work is included in this volume. --penguinrandomhouse.comTwo Introductory parables: Before the law --Imperial message --Longer stories: Description of a struggle --Wedding preparations in the country --Judgment --Metamorphosis --In the penal colony --Village schoolmaster (The giant mole) --Blumfeld, and elderly bachelor --Warden of the tomb --Country doctor --Hunter Gracchus --Hunter Gracchus: A fragment --Great Wall of China --News of the building of the wall: A fragment --Report to an academy --Report to an academy: Two fragments --Refusal --Hunger artist --Investigations of a dog --Little woman --The burrow --Josephine the singer, or the mouse folk --Children on a country road --The trees --Clothes --Excursion into the mountains --Rejection --The street window --The tradesman --Absent-minded window-gazing --The way home --Passers-by --On the tram --Reflections for gentlemen-jockeys --The wish to be a red Indian --Unhappiness --Bachelor's ill luck --Unmasking a confidence trickster --The sudden walk --Resolutions --A dream --Up in the gallery --A fratricide --The next village --A visit to a mine --Jackals and Arabs --The bridge --The bucket rider --The new advocate --An old manuscript --The knock at the manor gate --Eleven sons --My neighbor --A crossbreed (A sport) --The cares of a family man --A common confusion --The truth about Sancho Panza --The silence of the sirens --Prometheus --The city coat of arms --Poseidon --Fellowship --At night --The problem of our laws --The conscripton of troops --The test --The vulture --The helmsman --The top --A little fable --Home-coming --First sorrow --The departure --Advocates --The married couple --Give it up! --On parables.

    Uwe Timm has heard claims that currywurst first appeared in Berlin in the 1950s, but he seems to recall having eaten it much earlier, as a boy in his native Hamburg, at a stand owned and operated by Lena Brücker. He decides to check it out. Although the discovery of curried sausage is eventually explained, it is its prehistory - about how Lena Brücker met, seduced and held captive a German deserter in Hamburg, in April, 1945, just before the war's end - that is the tastiest part. Timm draws gorgeous details from Lena's fine-grained recollections, and the pleasure these provide her and the reader supply the tale's real charm.

    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