Sascha was born in Moscow, but now lives in Berlin with her two younger siblings and, until recently, her mother. She is precocious, independent, street-wise, and, since her stepfather murdered her mother several months ago, an orphan. Unlike most of her companions, she doesn’t dream of escaping from the tough housing project where they live. Sascha’s dreams are different: she longs to write a novel about her beautiful but naïve mother and she wants to end the life of Vadim, the man who brutally murdered her. Sascha’s story, as touching as any in recent literature, is that of a young woman consumed by two competing impulses, one celebrative and redemptive, the other murderous. In a voice that is candid and self-confident, at times childlike and at others all too mature, Sascha relates the universal and timeless struggle between those forces that can destroy us, and those that lead us back from sorrow and pain to life itself. Germany’s Freundin Magazine called Broken Glass Park “a gripping portrayal of life on the margins of society.” But Sascha’s story does not remain on the margins; it goes straight to the heart of what it means to be young, alive, and conscious in these first decades of the new century.

    Guest editor Robert Hass, a former Poet Laureate and a central figure in the poetry world, brings his passionate intelligence to "The Best American Poetry 2001." In his engaging introduction, Hass writes that after sifting through dozens of literary magazines, he "found that there were large numbers of poems that gave me pleasure, seemed to have inventive force, or intellectual passion or surprise." The works he selected are diverse in every way with only their excellence in common. With comments from the poets illuminating their work, and series editor David Lehman's always entertaining foreword assessing the current state of the art, "The Best American Poetry 2001" presents the richness and originality of this exciting moment in the history of American poetry.

    For after winning acclaim with this novel—awarded the Robert Walser Prize in 1978—she embarked on a 10,000-page literary project called “The Fortress,” creating over her lifetime elaborate colorful diagrams and typescripts so complicated that her publisher had to print them straight from her original documents. A project as brilliant as it is ambitious and as bizarre as it is brilliant, it earned her cult status, comparisons to James Joyce no less than Henry Darger, and admirers including Elfriede Jelinek and W. G. Sebald.Yet in this, her first novel, we discover not an eccentric fluke of literary nature but rather a brilliant and masterful satirist, philosophically minded yet raging with anger and wit, who under the guise of a domestic horror story manages to expose the hypocrisy and deep abiding cruelties running parallel, over time, through the society and the individual minds of a century.

    But, through the magical powers of the stone and his grandfather's flute, he also comes to find happiness and to possess a power greater than life itself.

    In "Love, Life, Goethe," John Armstrong tells the dramatic life story of this great poet--a representative man akin to Wordsworth in England or Emerson in America. In so doing, he subtly and imaginatively explores the ways that we can learn from Goethe, whether in love, suffering, friendship, or family. At the center of the project is the human yearning for happiness: In an imperfect world, how can we live well with what we have, and accept what we haven't? From our lives at home, to our attitude toward money and the politicians we choose, Armstrong explores the main themes of our lives through the life of Goethe, and helps us learn how to live.

    All five authors are among the greatest Portuguese poets ever, but whereas the first two have been consistently translated in English and are now part of the global poetic legacy, the other three are far more ignored beyond the borders of the Portuguese-speaking world where they are widely praised.

    The men blow the glass, and the women decorate and pack it. But when Joost Steinmann passes away unexpectedly one September night, his three daughters must learn to fend for themselves. While feisty Johanna takes a practical approach to looking for work, Ruth follows her heart, aiming to catch the eye of a handsome young villager. But it is dreamy, quiet Marie who has always been the most captivated by the magic—and sparkling possibilities—of the craft of glassblowing. As the spirited sisters work together to forge a brighter future for themselves on their own terms, they learn not only how to thrive in a man’s world, but how to remain true to themselves—and their hearts—in the process.

    While Gottfried adheres faithfully to the events as set down by Thomas, his chosen source, he is correct over questions of Chrisianity and religion, but no more.In fact his persona as narrator is oddly elusive and engaging. A virtuoso stylist, adept in irony and wit, he is subtle and almost unmedieval in putting across his own impressions of a love that transcends the bounds advocated by Church or society.

    With the German economy in ruins and street battles raging between rival political parties, the Weimar Republic is on its last legs. In the halls of the Reichstag, party leaders scramble for power and influence as the elderly president, Paul von Hindenburg, presides over a democracy pushed to the breaking point. Chancellors Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher spin a web of intrigue, vainly hoping to harness the growing popularity of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party while reining in its most extreme elements. These politicians struggle for control of a turbulent city where backroom deals and frightening public rallies alike threaten the country’s fragile democracy, with terrifying consequences for both Germany and the rest of the world.In The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic, Barth and Friedrichs have drawn on a wide array of primary sources to produce a colorful, multi-layered portrait of a period that was by no means predestined to plunge into the abyss, and which now seems disturbingly familiar.

    Told in stark, unsparing detail, Haffner’s story delves into the illicit underworld of Berlin on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power, describing how these blood brothers move from one petty crime to the next, spending their nights in underground bars and makeshift hostels, struggling together to survive the harsh realities of gang life, and finding in one another the legitimacy denied them by society.

    This is a women’s world: the mother, Fatma, nurtures her three children, with the grandmother Ayşe and the “aunties” of the neighbourhood, while Mustafa, the often unemployed father, recites Orhan Veli and drinks copious rakı, dreaming of building a larger family home. Here is the Turkey of the 1950s and early 1960s, with its political struggles, growing urbanisation, the Korean War, American comic books and the departure of the first wave of workers to Germany. The Anatolian grandparents carry with them their sagas of the war and the nascent Turkish Republic, enriched by wisdom, humour and village folklore. The author’s wonderful use of local narrative, storytelling, proverbs and prayers, and a prose that moves from the lyrical to gritty humour, re-creates this microcosm of neighbourhoods from a young girl’s intimate perspective. We follow her as she sits in school, visits relatives, dreams, listens to stories and experiments with early passions. Reality merges into mythological visions as, naïve, witty and explorative, she absorbs the colourful world around her.

    His last chance of survival is to leave the home town to which, despite being in his late forties, he clings as if to a comforting blanket. So he retreats into his cellar (and sometimes hides under his desk) to write a letter to Thomas Mann: appealing to the literary giant to help him find a foreign publisher, in order that the reasons to leave Drohobych will finally outweigh the reasons to stay. Evoking Bulgakov and Singer, Biller takes us on an astounding, burlesque journey into Schulz's world, which vacillates between shining dreams and unbearable nightmares - a world which, like Schulz's own stories, prophesies the apocalyptic events to come.Includes two stories by Bruno Schulz: 'Birds' and 'The Cinnamon Shops', from The Street of Crocodiles.

    Life is good for Farnor Yarrance. It is good for everybody in the valley. And has been for generations. So much so, that few ever feel the need to travel beyond it -- over the hill. And no one ever bothers to enter it from beyond. Until one day, they do. Men come from the south, haunted and pursued. And something else comes, silent and awful, from the north. With their arrival, an ancient corruption, festering slowly in the midst of the community, blossoms into a menace that threatens not only the valley but the land beyond, and the lands beyond that. Only Farnor, scarcely a man yet, has the power to oppose this menace, though he is unaware of it, his own soul clouded with bitterness and anger at the terrible tragedy that events now inflict on him. Not until he is pursued into the Great Forest to the north does he gradually learn the extent of his own power. And the truly terrifying nature of the forces he must face...

    When the celebrated actor Eugen Bischoff is found dead in his garden pavilion, suspicion falls immediately on Baron von Yosch, a well-to-do army officer who was once the lover of the dead man’s wife. By all appearances—the door was locked from the inside when the two shots rang out—the actor took his own life, but someone, or something, drove him to it. The baron sets out to learn all he can about the actor’s death in order to clear his name. Meanwhile, within a few days, similar apparent suicides are reported. What started out as a straightforward quest to establish Bischoff’s last deeds and discover the truth of his death becomes a search through the ages for an invisible enemy identified only by the actor’s dying breath, when he whispered: “. . . the Day of Judgment.” Leo Perutz combines his hallmark blend of suspense and the fantastic in this spine-tingling mystery.

    Gathered here is Lihn's most representative work from 1963 to 1977, drawn from his major books.