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Out of the many tragedies that almost seem to define the first decade of our century, the author has fashioned a richly woven, multilayered tapestry that not only explores the human side but brings out the cultural, historical, social, and political context within which the tragedies occur.

Almost twenty years after the fall of the wall, the Kreuzberg district of Berlin has become unbearably trendy and deeply unappealing to Alina and Wolf. They move to Muggelsee, at the city's bucolic border. But there, Wolf finds himself increasingly strained by the triviality of his daily routine with Alina.

One night in the middle of winter, as deep snow covers the mountains and forests of Austria, a doctor is crossing a ridge from Traich to Foding to see a patient. He stumbles over a body in the darkness and fears it is a corpse. But it's not a corpse at all - in fact, it's wooden-legged Victor Halfwit, collapsed, but still very much alive.

A fire broke out in the coal seams of their town years ago, and the flames are still smoldering underground. Margaret and Fritzi are the two sisters who are the last remaining youth of this vanishing town. Their inheritance is nothing but an abandoned swathe of land ruled by devastation.

Eich, a thirty-something freelance journalist, is researching a story on the radicals of the previous generation in Germany. His path keeps crossing with Nele, a young member of a left-wing group of student activists who are resistant to the increasing control and surveillance of all spheres of life by state and commercial institutions.

A decaying apartment building in post-Wall Berlin is home to Hell, a young woman with a passion for martial arts. When Hell's neighbor disappears she sets out across the city in search of her. In the course of her quest, she falls in love with a bank robber, confronts her own dark memories, and ends up saving more than just her missing neighbor.

Argues for a third way, a mode of thought that doesn't insist on these divisive either/ors. Neither an active refusal to engage with the world nor a consistent strategy of resistance, tarrying, as defined by Vogl, defers, multiplies, and suspends the strictures of decision-making.

Heiner Muller (1929-95) is widely acknowledged as one of the most important German dramatists since Bertolt Brecht. This title collects three of his plays - "Philoctetes", "The Horatian", and "Mauser" - that together constitute what Muller called an "experimental series," which both develops and critiques Brecht's theory of the Lehrstuck.

Paul Celan (1920-70) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-73) is recognized as one of post - World War II German literature's most important novelists, poets, and playwrights. This title collects their letters written between 1948 and 1961.

Presents a blend of documentary, collage, narration, and fictional interviews. This title offers an account of German General Kurt von Hammerstein whose acquiescence to Nazism consolidated Hitler's power - and of the heroic few who refused to share in the spoils.

The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is acknowledged as one of the major writers of our time. This collection includes seven stories that capture Bernhard's distinct darkly comic voice and vision - often compared to Kafka and Musil - commenting on a corrupted world.

Richly imagined and recounted in vivid prose of extraordinary beauty, this book is a stunning illustration of Ransmayr‿s talent for imbuing a captivating tale with intense metaphorical, indeed metaphysical force. The world‿s most powerful man, Qiánlóng, emperor of China, invites the famous eighteenth-century clockmaker Alister Cox to his court in Beijing. There, in the heart of the Forbidden City, the Englishman and his assistants are to build machines that mark the passing of time as a child or a condemned man might experience it and that capture the many shades of happiness, suffering, love, and loss that come with that passing. Mystified by the rituals of a rigidly hierarchical society dominated by an unimaginably wealthy, god-like ruler, Cox musters all his expertise and ingenuity to satisfy the emperor‿s desires. Finally, Qiánlóng, also known by the moniker Lord of Time, requests the construction of a clock capable of measuring eternity‿a perpetuum mobile. Seizing this chance to realize a long-held dream and honor the memory of his late beloved daughter, yet conscious of the impossibility of his task, Cox sets to work. As the court is suspended in a never-ending summer, festering with evil gossip about the monster these foreigners are creating, the Englishmen wonder if they will ever escape from their gilded cage. More than a meeting of two men, one isolated by power, the other by grief, this is an exploration of mortality and a virtuoso demonstration that storytelling alone can truly conquer time. Â

A unique and modern approach to money, wealth, greed, and financial ignorance presented via a story of a family in the Munich suburbs. The Federmanns live a pleasant but painfully normal life in the Munich suburbs. All that the three children really know about money is that there‿s never enough of it in their family.   Every so often, their impish Great-Aunt Fé descends on the city. After repeated cycles of boom and bust, profligacy and poverty, the grand old lady has become enormously wealthy and lives alone in a villa on the shore of Lake Geneva. But what does Great-Aunt Fé want from the Federmanns, her only surviving relatives? This time, she invites the children to tea at her luxury hotel where she spoils, flummoxes, and inspires them. Dismayed at their ignorance of the financial ways of the world, she gives them a crash course in economics that piques their curiosity, unsettles their parents, and throws open a whole new world. The young Federmanns are for once taken seriously and together they try to answer burning questions: Where does money come from? Why are millionaires and billionaires never satisfied? And why are those with the most always showered with more?   In this rich volume, the renowned poet, translator, and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger turns his gimlet eye on the mechanisms and machinations of banks and politicians‿the human greed, envy, and fear that fuels the global economy. A modern, but moral-less fable, Money, Money, Money! is shot through with Enzensberger‿s trademark erudition, wit, and humanist desire to cut through jargon and forearm his readers against obscurantism. Â

Weiss's play is a lyrical investigation of the intense and influential poems of Hoelderlin and the turbulent life behind them.

For much of her career, Elfriede Jelinek has been maligned in the press for both her unrelenting critique of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. Despite this, her central role in shaping contemporary literature was finally recognized in 2004 with the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Although she is an internationally recognized playwright, Jelinek's plays are difficult to find in English, which makes this new volume, which includes "Rechnitz: The Exterminating Angel," "The Merchant's Contracts" and "Charges (The Supplicants)" all the more valuable. In "Rechnitz," a chorus of messengers reports on the circumstances of the massacre of 180 Jews, an actual historical event that took place near the Austrian/Hungarian border town of Rechnitz. In "The Merchant's Contracts," Jelinek brings us a comedy of economics, where the babble and media spin of spectators leave small investors alienated and bearing the brunt of the economic crisis. In "Charges (The Supplicants)," Jelinek offers a powerful analysis of the plight of refugees, from ancient times to the present. She responds to the immeasurable suffering among those fleeing death, destruction, and political suppression in their home countries and, drawing on sources as widely separated in time and intent as up-to-the-minute blog postings and Aeschylus's "The Supplicants," Jelinek asks what refugees want, how we as a society view them, and what political, moral, and personal obligations they impose on us.

Collected in their entirety for the first time in English, the insightful texts in Night Music show the breadth of Adorno's musical understanding and reveal an overlooked side to this significant thinker.

Collected Poems gathers Trakl's early, middle, and late work, ranging widely, from his haunting prose pieces to his darkly beautiful poems documenting the first bloody weeks of World War I on the Eastern Front.

A diary-like sequence of poems from one of Austria's best-known contemporary voices. Exploring longing, lust for life, aging, mortality, grief, and flowers in her inimitable late style, études is a diary-like sequence of poems by one of the greatest living Austrian poets. Friederike Mayröcker's almost daily entries give us a unique view into the interplay between desire and her motivation for writing. In Mayröcker's case, she writes both to keep a vanished world present and to exploit the possibilities of being present for constant experimentation. The poems in this volume are not only studies of how the mind works, moving from fragment to fragment, but also experiments with techniques of repetition, typography, collage, and quotation. Mayröcker transforms the humble page into spaces of radical openness. After all, she says, a poem is that which "opens everything up." Each poem is date-stamped, and each date acts as a kind of permission for Mayröcker to pour in everything from notes on doctor's visits to gorgeously structured elegies to obsessively repeating fragments of memory that act upon the whole like bits of recurring melody. Rarely before has the intimate process of writing been so exquisitely laid bare than in études. Traversing the boundaries of literary forms with Mayröcker's distinctive style, this important volume strikes an admirable balance between playfulness and serious inquiry.

"The essay ... is based on a speech, given at the Lyrik Kabinett in Munich in October 2017"--Title page verso.

A major collection that brings together 166 stories by the German master that deal with love.

An account of the life and death of Buenaventura Durruti, a Spanish Civil War leader, that turns his life into a larger story of revolution, commitment, and failed struggles for freedom.

Thousands upon thousands of books have been written about Immanuel Kant since his death. None, let's be clear, have been quite like what we have here. In Party Fun with Kant, Nicolas Mahler tells the story of Kant--and his fellow serious-minded figures from the history of philosophy--with a comic edge. With his witty visual style and clever wordplay, he delves into their lives and emerges with hitherto unknown scenes that show them in a new (and far less serious) light. We go to parties with Kant, visit an art exhibition with Hegel, shop at the supermarket with Nietzsche, and go to the cinema with Deleuze, and celebrate the dream wedding with de Beauvoir. In each case, we come away knowing more about the life, thoughts, and feelings of the philosopher--getting to know them as people rather than as stony-faced figures long since robbed of any existence beyond their ideas. The result is pure fun, but with plenty of insight, too.

In Eulogy for the Living, Wolf recalls with crystalline precision the everyday details of her life as a middle-class grocer's daughter, and the struggles within the family--struggles common to most families, but exacerbated by the rise of Nazism.

A monologue delivered by the female character in Samuel Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape.