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.

    When he is discovered to be an exceptionally gifted student, the entire community presses him onto a path of serious scholarship. Hans dutifully follows the regimen of tireless study and endless examinations, his success rewarded only with more crushing assignments. When Hans befriends a rebellious young poet, he begins to imagine other possibilities outside the narrowly circumscribed world of the academy. Finally sent home after a nervous breakdown, Hans is revived by nature and romance, and vows never to return to the gray conformity of the academic system.

    Soon Siggi is stealing the paintings to keep them safe from his father. Against the great brooding northern landscape. Siggi recounts the clash of father and son, of duty and personal loyalty, in wartime Germany. “I was trying to find out,” Lenz says, "where the joys of duty could lead a people"

    When the Robots revolt, killing all but one of their masters, they must attempt to learn the secret of self-duplication. But their attempts at replication leave them with nothing but bloody chunks of meat. It's not until two robots fall in love and are christened "Adam" and "Eve" by the last surviving human that Nature emerges triumphant.

    

    He went on to become an internationally renowned master of modern drama, famous for the comic proportions and bizarre effects that allow his work to be simultaneously hilarious, tragic, and profound. As Ionesco has said, "Theater is not literature. . . . It is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means."

    Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare's harshest and most challenging studies of power, politics and masculinity, based around the life of Caius Marcius. Based on the Roman chronicles of Plutarch's Lives and Livy's History of Rome, the play is set in the early years of the Roman Republic. Its famous opening scene, particularly admired by Bertolt Brecht, portrays its citizens as starving and rebellious, and horrified by the arrogant and dismissive attitude of Caius Marcius, one of Rome's most valiant but also political naive soldiers. Spurred on by his ambitious mother Volumnia, Caius takes the city of Corioles, is renamed Coriolanus in honour of his victory, and is encouraged to run for senate. However, his contempt for the citizens, who he calls "scabs" and "musty superfluity" ultimately leads to his exile and destructive alliance with his deadly foe, Aufidius. Despite its relative unpopularity, Coriolanus is a fascinating study of both public and personal life. Its language is dense and complex, as its representation of the tensions built into the fabric of Roman political life. Yet it also contains extraordinarily intimate scenes between Coriolanus and both his mother, who ultimately proves "most mortal" to her own son, and his enemy Aufidius, whose "rapt heart" is happier to see Coriolanus than his own wife. One of Shakespeare's darker and more disturbing plays. --Jerry Brotton

    It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological.Travelers by ship from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess, an arrogant and unfriendly man. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Then a mysterious passenger steps forward to advise them and their fortunes change. How he came to possess his extraordinary grasp of the game of chess and at what cost lie at the heart of Zweig's story.This new translation of Chess Story brings out the work's unusual mixture of high suspense and poignant reflection.

    First published by Yale University Press in 1956, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and has since sold more than one million copies. This edition includes a new foreword by Harold Bloom.The action covers a fateful, heart-rending day from around 8:30 am to midnight, in August 1912 at the seaside Connecticut home of the Tyrones - the semi-autobiographical representations of O'Neill himself, his older brother, and their parents at their home, Monte Cristo Cottage.One theme of the play is addiction and the resulting dysfunction of the family. All three males are alcoholics and Mary is addicted to morphine. They all constantly conceal, blame, resent, regret, accuse and deny in an escalating cycle of conflict with occasional desperate and half-sincere attempts at affection, encouragement and consolation.

    We follow him from an orphaned childhood to the casual atrocities of occupying troops, through his own soldiering adventures, and up to his final vocation as a hermit alone on an island. Mike Mitchell's superb translation allows readers to enjoy more fully one of the great masterpieces of European literature and the first German bestseller.

    The play depicts an authoritarian regime and the play's central character, the young Antigone, mirrored the predicament of the French people in the grips of tyranny. One of the masterpieces of the modern French stage.

    Often referred to as a "comedy of manners", "The School for Scandal" is one Sheridan's most performed plays and a classic of English comedic drama.

    Manners and morality are also victims of Wilde's sharp wit in Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband, in which snobbery and hypocrisy are laid bare. In Salomé and A Florentine Tragedy, Wilde makes powerful use of historical settings to explore the complex relationship between sex and power. The range of these plays displays Wilde's delight in artifice, masks and disguises, and reveals the pretentions of the social world in which he himself played such a dazzling and precarious part.Richard Allen Cave's introduction and notes discuss the themes of the plays and Wilde's innovative methods of staging. This edition includes the excised 'Gribsby' scene from The Importance of Being Earnest.

    Set in Louis XIII's reign, it is the moving and exciting drama of one of the finest swordsmen in France, gallant soldier, brilliant wit, tragic poet-lover with the face of a clown. Rostand's extraordinary lyric powers gave birth to a universal hero--Cyrano De Bergerac--and ensured his own reputation as author of one of the best-loved plays in the literature of the stage.This translation, by the American poet Brian Hooker, is nearly as famous as the original play itself, and is generally considered to be one of the finest English verse translations ever written.

    The audience was scandalized by this revolutionary satire, developed from a schoolboy farce, which began with a four-letter word, defied all the traditions of the stage, and ridiculed the established values of bourgeois society.Barbara Wright’s witty translation of this riotous work is accompanied with drawings by Franciszka Themerson. Two previously untranslated essays in which Jarry explains his theories of the drama have also been included.