The Flying Dutchman


Richard Wagner - 1843
    The perfect listening/reading combination, this book/CD package includes a world-class recording of the complete opera along with a full-color 144-page guide featuring the libretto, history, a synopsis and more. The Flying Dutchman spotlights world-renowned performers Peter Seiffert and Pinchas Steinberg. The book also details the life and work of the composer, the careers of the most famous and talented performers of all time and the nuances of the operas themselves.

The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade


Peter Weiss - 1963
    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?

The Maimed


Hermann Ungar - 1922
    At the same time he must witness the steady physical and mental deterioration of his lifelong friend who is suffering from an unnamed disease. Part psychological farce, Ungar tells a dark, ironic tale of chaos overtaking one's meticulously ordered life.One of only two novels Ungar wrote, this translation marks the first time this important novel and any of his work has been translated into English. Ungar's novellas and short stories are collected in Boys & Murderers .

The Treasure Chest


Johann Peter Hebel - 1811
    A wonderful collection of moral tales, anecdotes, jokes, reports of murders, disasters and mysteries, all originally written for inclusion in a popular religious almanac.First issued in collected form in 1811, Hebel's stories cover a broad spectrum of human experience, with characters ranging from Napoleon and the Austrian Emperor Joseph, to common soldiers and working men and women.

Love Poems


Erich Fried - 1979
    Fried's poetry holds some of the most tender lines of poetry in any language. The universal theme of humanity and the various issues that perplex the human race are all presented in these works. A stoic who could find humor and an optimistic message in every aspect of human life, Fried's depth of vision and humility is both refreshing and consoling.

The Waterfalls of Slunj


Heimito von Doderer - 1963
    The Claytons open a branch office of their business in Vienna, the center of that incredibly varied and complex universe that was the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I. Their ensuing social and personal entanglements furnish the materials of a superbly civilized family chronicle (quite the opposite from Sun & Moon's recent von Doderer novel, The Merowingians), whose central symbol is a gigantic, thundering mass of water -- a force that may be life-giving or terribly destructive. Beneath a staunchly bourgeois surface, von Doderer's story telling is heavily tinged with ironic social commentary and suffused with acute, post-Freudian psychology.

Friedrich


Hans Peter Richter - 1961
    At first, Friedrich seemed to be the more fortunate, but when Hitler came to power, things began to change. Friedrich was expelled from school and became an orphan when his mother died and his father was arrested and deported.This is a terrifying story of the destruction of a single Jewish family.

The Last Days of Mankind


Karl Kraus - 1918
    Kraus began to write the play in 1915 and first published it as a series of special Fackel issues in 1919. Its epilogue, "Die letzte Nacht" ("The last night") had already been published in 1918 as a special issue.This edition was abridged and edited by Frederick Ungar. It contains an introduction by the editor and critical analysis by Franz H. Mautner.

Jew Süss


Lion Feuchtwanger - 1925
    Surrounded by jealous & hateful enemies, Süß helps the Duke create a corrupt state that involves them both in immense wealth & power.

The Little Ghost


Otfried Preußler - 1966
    A little ghost who always wanted to see the town by daylight creates chaos when he does, and finds himself unable to be a night ghost again.

The Eternal Philistine


Ödön von Horváth - 1930
    Adrift in their acquisitive desires, they are vulnerable to the propaganda of the State — making this novel brilliantly foresightful in its understanding of politics and human nature at a crucial point in modern history.Ödön von Horváth’s scathing insight, in fact, led to his having to flee the very society he depicted when, living in Berlin, he drew the wrath of the Nazis. And yet this hilarious tour-de-force — written just after his escape, and just before his death in a tragic accident — eschews bitterness for rambunctious perseverance and compassion, and provides ample evidence of why von Horváth deserves renewed appreciation.

Finn's Hotel


James Joyce - 1923
    Finn's Hotel is a luminous and often funny work, and it reveals Joyce's creative process during the transition between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency


Tove Ditlevsen - 2021
    Childhood tells the story of a misfit child's single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today's discussions around feminism. Ditlevsen's trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family and growing up--in this sense, it's Copenhagen's answer to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction.Born in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen became famous for her poetry while still a teenager, and went on to write novels, stories and memoirs before committing suicide in 1976. Having been dismissed by the critical establishment in her lifetime as a working-class, female writer, she is now being rediscovered and championed as one of Denmark's most important modern authors, with Tove fever gripping readers.

The Thief and Other Stories


Georg Heym - 1913
    There are seven in all, with subjects ranging from social revolt to insanity, disease and unrequited love. They are considered some of the finest works of German literary Expressionism and have been compared to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and the prose pieces of Baudelaire.

Measuring the World


Daniel Kehlmann - 2005
    One of them, the Prussian aristocrat Alexander von Humboldt, negotiates savanna and jungle, travels down the Orinoco, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores every hole in the ground. The other, the barely socialized mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss, does not even need to leave his home in Göttingen to prove that space is curved. He can run prime numbers in his head. He cannot imagine a life without women, yet he jumps out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a mathematical formula. Von Humboldt is known to history as the Second Columbus. Gauss is recognized as the greatest mathematical brain since Newton. Terrifyingly famous and more than eccentric in their old age, the two meet in Berlin in 1828. Gauss has hardly climbed out of his carriage before both men are embroiled in the political turmoil sweeping through Germany after Napoleon’s fall.Already a huge best seller in Germany, Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene.