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Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years


Thomas Mann - 1954
    Krull is a man unhampered by moral precepts that govern the conduct of ordinary mortals, and this natural lack of scruple, coupled with his formidable mental and physical endowments, enables him to develop the arts of subterfuge and deception with astonishing success and to rise swiftly from poverty to affluence. Following Krull along the shady paths his nature has destined him to take, the reader moves through a world peopled by bizarre characters from the lowest to the highest reaches of European society. Chameleon-like, Krull readily adapts himself to the situation of the moment, and so adept in the practices of chicanery does he become that his victims almost seem to count themselves privileged. And so it is too with the women who encounter the irresistible Krull, for where Krull is, the normal laws of human behavior are in suspense.Originally the character of Felix Krull appeared in a short story Mann wrote in 1911. The story wasn't published until 1936, in the book Stories of Three Decades along with 23 other stories written from 1896 to 1929, the year in which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Much later, he expanded the original story into a novel, managing to finish and publish Part 1, "The Early Years," of the Confessions of Felix Krull to great public success. Due to Mann's death in 1955 the saga of the morally flexible and irresistible con-man remains unfinished.

The Glass Bees


Ernst Jünger - 1957
    Zapparoni, a brilliant businessman, has turned his advanced understanding of technology and his strategic command of the information and entertainment industries into a discrete form of global domination. But Zapparoni is worried that the scientists he depends on might sell his secrets. He needs a chief of security, and Richard, a veteran and war hero, is ready for the job. However, when he arrives at the beautiful country compound that is Zapparoni's headquarters, he finds himself subjected to an unexpected ordeal. Soon he is led to question his past, his character, and even his senses....

Funeral for a Dog


Thomas Pletzinger - 2008
    Mandelkern has been quarreling with his wife (who is also his editor); he suspects she has other reasons for sending him away. After stumbling on a manuscript of Svensson's about a complicated ménage à trois, Mandelkern is plunged into mysteries past and present. Rich with anthropological and literary allusion, this prize-winning debut set in Europe, Brazil, and New York, tells the parallel stories of two writers struggling with the burden of the past and the uncertainties of the future. Funeral for a Dog won the prestigious Uwe-Johnson Prize.

The Passport


Herta Müller - 1986
    Stories from the past are woven together with the problems Windisch, the village miller, faces after he applies for permission to migrate to West Germany. Herta Müller (Herta Mueller) describes with poetic attention the dreams and superstitions, conflicts and oppression of a forgotten region, the Banat, in the Danube Plain. In sparse, poetic language, Muller captures the forlorn plight of a trapped people.

Gilgi, eine von uns


Irmgard Keun - 1931
    Gilgi is a secretary in a hosiery firm, but she doesn’t intend to stay there for long: she’s disciplined and ambitious, taking language classes, saving up money to go abroad, and carefully avoiding both the pawing of her boss and any other prolonged romantic entanglements. But then she falls in love with Martin, a charming drifter, and leaves her job for domestic bliss—which turns out not to be all that blissful– and Gilgi finds herself pregnant and facing a number of moral dilemmas.Revolutionary at the time for its treatment of sexual harassment, abortion, single motherhood, and the “New Woman,” Gilgi remains a perceptive and beautifully constructed novel about one woman’s path to maturity. It is presented here in its first-ever translation into English.

Deutsch: Na Klar! An Introductory German Course


Robert Di Donato - 1990
    The sixth edition preserves the hallmark features that instructors have come to trust, and through its use of current, authentic cultural materials, Deutsch: Na klar! teaches students how to use German in real-life situations effectively and how to communicate successfully in the German-speaking world.

Unrecounted


W.G. Sebald - 2003
    Sebald, and his friend and collaborator, the German artist Jan Peter Tripp. For a number of years until Sebald's death in 2001, the two exchanged poems and lithographs. Unrecounted is the startlingly original result of this long artistic friendship - a creative dialogue inspired by shared concerns. Tripp's lithographs, which portray pairs of eyes - among them those of Beckett, Borges, Proust - combine with W.G. Sebald's words in Unrecounted to speak of moments salvaged from time passing, of our eyes bearing witness, and of memory and remembrance.'Condenses Sebald's complex visual imagination to its poetic core' Scotland on Sunday'Elegiac, enhancing ... Sebald will not be forgotten' Time Out'A haunting testament to Sebald's singular and lasting vision' Observer'The magic of W.G. Sebald's incandescent body of work continues to unfold, with this unexpected collaboration' Susan Sontag'Anyone with a serious interest in fiction should read Sebald' Daily TelegraphW.G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944 and settled permanently in England in 1970, where he was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia until his death in 2001. He is the author of four works of fiction: The Emigrants, which won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Heinrich Heine Prize, and the Joseph Breitbach Prize; The Rings of Saturn; Vertigo; and Austerlitz, which was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Alongside this stand books of poetry For Years Now, After Nature, Unrecounted, and Across the Land and the Water, and the non-fiction books On the Natural History of Destruction and Campo Santo. Jan Peter Tripp was born in 1945 and lives and works in Alsace.

Ten Poems to Last a Lifetime


Roger Housden - 2004
    In it, Roger Housden offers us poems on life and death, happiness, seeing ourselves in relation to the world, and, of course, the ineffable--the things that really matter when the chips are down. He describes these passionate poems as "bread for the soul and fire for the spirit."The poets Housden has chosen are Billy Collins, Hayden Carruth, Dorianne Laux, James Wright, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Mary Oliver from the United States, D. H. Lawrence and John Keats from England, Rainer Maria Rilke from Germany, Fleur Adcock from New Zealand, and Seng-Ts'an from sixth-century China. And yes, that adds up to eleven, not ten. Housden decided to include a bonus poem for his faithful readers in this, the final volume of the series. As before, Housden's luminous essays provide an elegant and easy passage into the sometimes daunting world of poetry, enabling readers to feel that in him they have found a trusted guide and mentor.

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace


Harold Bloom - 1987
    A collection of seven critical essays discussing Tolstoy's novel, arranged in chronological order of their original publication.

The Birth of Tragedy


Friedrich Nietzsche - 1871
    Nietzsche outlined a distinction between its two central forces: the Apolline, representing beauty and order, and the Dionysiac, a primal or ecstatic reaction to the sublime. He believed the combination of these states produced the highest forms of music and tragic drama, which not only reveal the truth about suffering in life, but also provide a consolation for it. Impassioned and exhilarating in its conviction, The Birth of Tragedy has become a key text in European culture and in literary criticism.

Erotic Poems


Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 1795
    They are here presented as Goethe boldly conceived them together with the long-surpressed narrative poem known as The Diary. Superficially the story of a failed sexual adventure by a man of 60, at another level this is a profound study of the psychology of desire and the nature of fidelity, as well as being one of the most beautiful and good-humoured poems in the German language. Completing the edition is a selection from Goethe's more light-hearted and much censored cycle of erotica, the Venetian Epigrams. David Luke's translations do full justice to Goethe's aim of liberating German poetry and restoring sexual love to its central position in human life. Hans Vaget's fine introduction provides the background to these poems, as well as showing some of the profound and little-known connections between them.

Hunters and Gatherers


Geoff Nicholson - 1991
    The narrator, Steve Geddes, is a writer doing a book on collectors, especially those with "unlikely, bizarre, or exceptionally useless collections." His research leads him to the Havergals, a wealthy, eccentric couple. They "collect people"; that is, she does the "collecting" while he watches-"a bout of troilism," as Geddes calls it. By accident, Geddes learns that reclusive "cult author" Thornton McCain may have written a book that Geddes hasn't heard of. Geddes the observer becomes both obsessed collector and, for the randy Havergals, object to be collected. An insightful delight from start to finish; recommended for all fiction collections.

Lyric Novella


Annemarie Schwarzenbach - 1933
    Lyric Novella is her story of a young man’s obsession with a Berlin variété actress. Despite having his future career mapped out for him in the diplomatic service, the young man begins to question all his family values under Sibylle’s spell. His family, future, and social standing become irrelevant when set against his overriding compulsion to pick her up every night from the theater so they can go for a drive. Schwarzenbach’s clear, psychologically acute prose makes this novella an evocative narrative, with many intriguing parallels to her own life. In fact, she admitted after publication that her hero was in fact a young woman, not a man, leaving little doubt that Lyric Novella is a literary tale of lesbian love during socially and politically turbulent times. Praise for the German Edition “The subject of Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s story is not failed love— Sibylle’s apparent emotional coldness—but the failure of love—the protagonist’s helpless inability, in the crucial moment, to accept his human responsibility toward the beloved.”— Neue Zürcher Zeitung “The work bears the face of its time, but it is so gentle, silent and veiled that one can barely exclude the person behind the mask. A mask is in fact this face, because the hero is a heroine who does not want to be seen.”—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Annotations to Finnegans Wake


Roland McHugh - 1980
    Each page of the Annotations corresponds directly with a page of the standard Viking/Penguin edition of Finnegans Wake and contains line-by-line notes following the placement of the passages to which they refer. The reader can thus look directly from text to notes and back again, with no need to consult separate glossaries or other listings.McHugh's richly detailed notes distill decades of scholarship, explicating foreign words, unusual English connotations and colloquial expressions, place names, historical events, song titles and quotations, parodies of other texts, and Joyce's diverse literary and popular sources. The third edition has added material reflecting fifteen years of research, including significant new insights from Joyce's compositional notebooks (the "Buffalo Notebooks"), now being edited for the first time.

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.