Book picks similar to
Selected Works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
fiction
german
classics
literature
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce - 1916
Both an insight into Joyce's life and childhood, and a unique work of modernist fiction, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a novel of sexual awakening, religious rebellion and the essential search for voice and meaning that every nascent artist must face in order to blossom fully into themselves.
Les Liaisons dangereuses
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos - 1782
The subject of major film and stage adaptations, the novel's prime movers, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, form an unholy alliance and turn seduction into a game - a game which they must win. This new translation gives Laclos a modern voice, and readers will be able a judge whether the novel is as "diabolical" and "infamous" as its critics have claimed, or whether it has much to tell us about the kind of world we ourselves live in. David Coward's introduction explodes myths about Laclos's own life and puts the book in its literary and cultural context.
The Sunlight Dialogues
John Gardner - 1972
Sheriff Fred Clumly is trying desperately to unravel mysteries surrounding a disorderly, nameless drifter called "The Sunlight Man," who has been jailed for painting the word "LOVE" across two lanes of traffic, and who is later suspected of murder. The men battle over morality, freedom and their opposing notions of justice, leading each to find his own state of grace. Their conflict is mirrored in the community of middlebrow politicians and their church-going wives, Native Americans, working-class immigrants, farmers, soldiers, petty thieves, and even centenarian sisters too stubborn to die. Gardner's alchemy is existential: from the most raw, vulnerable, and conflicting characters in the American melting pot, he transmutes common denominators of human isolation and longing. With unnerving suspense, his acute ear for American speech, and permeated by his deep-rooted belief in morality, this expansive, sprawling, and ambitious novel is John Gardner's masterpiece: "A superb literary achievement," noted The Boston Globe.
Gargantua and Pantagruel
François Rabelais
And in Pantagruel and its three sequels, Rabelais parodied tall tales of chivalry and satirized the law, theology and academia to portray the bookish son of Gargantua who becomes a Renaissance Socrates, divinely guided in his wisdom, and his idiotic, self-loving companion Panurge.
The Red and the Black
Stendhal - 1830
Soon realizing that success can only be achieved by adopting the subtle code of hypocrisy by which society operates, he begins to achieve advancement through deceit and self-interest. His triumphant career takes him into the heart of glamorous Parisian society, along the way conquering the gentle, married Madame de Rênal, and the haughty Mathilde. But then Julien commits an unexpected, devastating crime - and brings about his own downfall. The Red and the Black is a lively, satirical portrayal of French society after Waterloo, riddled with corruption, greed, and ennui, and Julien - the cold exploiter whose Machiavellian campaign is undercut by his own emotions - is one of the most intriguing characters in European literature.
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.
The Hemingway Stories
Ernest Hemingway - 2021
A new collection showcasing the best of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories including his well-known classics, as featured in 'Hemingway', the magnificent three-part, six-hour PBS documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.
The Collected Short Stories of Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky - 1909
Born of the people, and having experienced in his own person their sufferings and their misery, he was enabled by his extraordinary genius to voice their grievances and their aspirations for a better life as no academic could. His international fame rests on a tremendous literary output, including the powerful play "The Lower Depths," the monumental novel of the 1905 Russian Revolution, "Mother," his vital Autobiography and, of course, his short stories. This edition of "The Collected Short Stories of Maxim Gorky" includes his benchmark masterpieces "Creatures That Once Were Men" and "Twenty-Six Men and a Girl" as well as "Chelkash and My Fellow-Traveller" among many others. The collection represents the very best of Gorky's genius.For this edition the renowned scholar and author Frederic Ewen has written a penetrating new introduction evaluating Gorky's place in the world's literary pantheon.
The Thief's Journal
Jean Genet - 1949
Writing in the intensely lyrical prose style that is his trademark, the man, Jean Cocteau, dubbed France's "Black Prince of Letters" here reconstructs his early adult years - time he spent as a petty criminal and vagabond, traveling through Spain and Antwerp, occasionally border hopping across to the rest of Europe, always trying to stay one step ahead of the authorities.
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - 1962
The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy"--Harrison SalisburyThis unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available, and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.
The Book of Blam
Aleksandar Tišma - 1972
The war has ended, but for Blam the town is haunted with its presence, and memories of its dead: Aaron Grün, the hunchbacked watchmaker; Eduard Fiker, a lamp merchant; Jakob Mentele, a stove fitter; Arthur Spitzer, a grocer who played amateur soccer and had non-Jewish friends; and Sándor Vértes, a communist lawyer. They stand before him as ever, but they are only the ghosts in Blam's mind. Accompanying the others are Blam's family and his best friend, all of whom perished in the infamous Novi Sad raid in January 1942. Blam lives. He seeks no revenge, no retribution. His life is a spectator's-made all the more agonizing by the clarity with which he sees the events around him. The silhouettes of the dead pass before him, and he incorporates what would have been their daily lives into his own. And in telling the story of one man's life after the war, Ti
The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr
E.T.A. Hoffmann - 1819
T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) who first explored many of the themes and techniques which were later used by writers from Dickens to Dostoyevsky, Poe to Kafka, Baudelaire to Marquez. His career reached a glorious climax in The Tomcat Murr, perhaps the strangest novel of the nineteenth century.. "Hoffmann was a follower of Cervantes and Sterne, a pioneering 'magic realist', fascinated by Gothic horror, extreme mental states and supernatural events occurring within sharply (and sometimes satirically) rendered social settings. A talented composer and painter, he portrayed himself in the guise of Johannes Kreisler - the hypochondriac, antisocial and moody but brilliant musician. In this astonishing book, a vain and very bourgeois tomcat sets out to write his memoirs, using a biography of Kreisler as a blotting pad. By a printer's error, the two lives get spliced together into a bizarre double narrative. A supreme example of literary bravado, The Tomcat Murr is also shot through with the warmth, humanity and almost uncanny ability to captivate his readers which make Hoffmann the greatest of German story-tellers.
The Collected Stories
Alexander Pushkin - 1828
In both prose and verse, Pushkin was one of the world’s great storytellers: direct and dramatic, clear-sighted, vivid, and passionate.This new and expanded Everyman’s edition of his stories includes all the mature work. In addition to such novella-length masterpieces as The Captain’s Daughter and The Tales of Belkin the collection now contains many more short pieces and the masterly History of Pugachev, a powerful account of the man who rebelled against Catherine the Great.
Letty Fox: Her Luck
Christina Stead - 1946
This vast Flemish canvas of a novel, full of strikingly realistic likenesses and unforgettable grotesques, is a major work by one of the outstanding novelists of the twentieth century.