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A new play from Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek that deals with the 2015 terror attack on the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo's offices in Paris. In Greek mythology, it is Hera who blinds the hero Heracles, so that, in a fit of fury, he kills his own family. In the twenty-first century, the gods have another name. So did the three young men who stormed a magazine's editorial office and a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015 and murdered twelve people. The blind fury, however, remained and more virulent than ever, not least because the weapons were so much more effective. In this raging text, arguably one of her darkest, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek investigates topical political events in the context of enduring history and myths. Fury expresses itself not only multi-voiced and from the changing perspective of Islamist terrorists (and their special hatred of Jews), in the shape of furious German citizens, individual narcissistic humiliation, or brutal distribution battles around the globe. Rather, fury also appears as the motor that has driven people with a devastating force for centuries. With her characteristic linguistic power, Jelinek articulates her own disconcertedness in the face of these crimes. In passing, she returns repeatedly to the contradiction between religious laws against representation and the deluge of images online, where movies of assassination, severed heads, and other atrocities are exhibited for millions to see. Fury is a compact grand epic that starts in primal times and attempts to describe the indescribable, relating the inexplicable in our times.

A twist on the classic tale of Alice in Wonderland told through Nicolas Mahler's distinctive graphic novel style. Alice is back in Wonderland. Here she meets the White Rabbit, who leads her down into his rabbit hole in search of an illustrated edition of H. C. Artmann's Frankenstein in Sussex. Over the course of the novel, Alice repeatedly runs into the Rabbit, who quotes freely from other literary works by the likes of Herman Melville and E. M. Cioran. Unlike in Lewis Carroll's classic, Alice is not traveling the Wonderland we know. Rather, in Nicolas Mahler's whimsical graphic novel retelling, she is in a house deep beneath the ground. On subsequent floors, she encounters the famous creations of Lewis Carroll: the Hookah-Smoking Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Mock Turtle, and many others. One after the other, these creatures address the terrors of childhood and youth. It is only when Alice reaches the ground floor of the house that we arrive at the inevitable climax: face to face with Frankenstein's Monster.

A novel of two young friends growing up on divergent paths in the last days of Communist East Germany. What is it like to be young and broken in a country that is on the brink of collapse? This is what acclaimed poet and sound artist Ulrike Almut Sandig shows us in her debut novel, through the story of old friends Ruth and Viktor in the last days of Communist East Germany. The two central characters are inseparable since kindergarten, but they are forced to go their different ways to escape their difficult childhood: Ruth into music and the life of a professional musician; Viktor into violence and a neo-Nazi gang. Monsters Like Us is a story of families, a story of abuse, a story about the search for redemption and the ways it takes shape over generations. More than anything, it is about the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and who we want to be. Bold, brutal, and lyrical, this is a coming-of-age novel that charts the hidden violence of the world we live in today.

A powerful performance text that illuminates incidents of anti-immigrant violence in contemporary Germany. Between 1998 and 2007 a series of killings in Germany, disdainfully styled "doner murders" by the media, were attributed by German police to internecine rivalries among immigrants. The victims included eight citizens of Turkish origin, a Greek citizen, and a German policewoman. Not until 2011 did the German public learn not only that the police had ignored signs pointing to the real perpetrators, a neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Underground, but also that important files, possibly containing evidence implicating state agencies, had disappeared from the archives of Federal Police and intelligence organizations. Esther Dischereit, one of the preeminent German-Jewish voices of the post-Holocaust generation, takes that failure of the state to protect its citizens from racist violence as the core of her performance text Flowers for Otello: On the Crimes That Came Out of Jena. Seeking an appropriate language with which to meet the bereaved, she also finds a way to raise the blanket of silence that is used by those who would prefer that we forget. Combining witness testimony, myth, and incidents from a history of violence against minorities, Flowers for Otello, in Iain Galbraith's translation, refuses chaos, instead revealing the chilling, patterned order of tragedy while bringing a great writer's humanism to the fore.

One of Germany's greatest living writers offers up an analysis (and samples) of his failed projects. "My dear fellow artists, whether writers, actors, painters, film-makers, singers, sculptors, or composers, why are you so reluctant to talk about your minor or major failures?" With that question, Hans Magnus Enzensberger--the most senior among Germany's great writers--begins his amusing ruminations on his favorite projects that never saw the light of day. There is enlightenment in every embarrassing episode, he argues, and while artists tend to forget their successes quickly, the memory of a project that came to nothing stays in the mind for years, if not decades. Triumphs hold no lessons for us, but fiascos can extend our understanding, giving insight into the conditions of production, conventions, and practices of the industries concerned, and helping novices to assess the snares and minefields in the industry of their choice. What's more, Enzensberger argues, flops have a therapeutic effect: They can cure, or at least alleviate, the vocational illnesses of authors, be it the loss of control or megalomania. In Gone but Not Forgotten, Enzensberger looks back at his uncompleted experiments not just in the world of books but also in cinema, theater, opera, and journal publishing, and shares with us a "store of ideas" teeming with sketches of still-possible projects. He also reflects on the likely reasons for these big and small defeats. Interspersed among his ruminations are excerpts from those experiments, giving readers a taste of what we missed. Together, the pieces in this volume build a remarkable picture of a versatile genius's range of work over more than half a century and make us reflect on the very nature of success and failure by which we measure our lives.

The first English translation of a major work of postwar German poetry. Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger (1921-2016) was a member of the Gruppe 47 writers' group, which sought to renew German-language literature after World War II. From a wide-ranging literary career that encompassed all genres, Squandered Advice was Aichinger's sole poetry collection. The book gathers poems written over several decades, yet Aichinger's poetic voice remains remarkably consistent, frequently addressing us or a third party, often in the imperative, with many poems written in the form of a question. Even though they use free verse throughout, the poems are still tightly structured, often around sounds or repetition, using spare language. Phrases are often fragmentary, torn off, and juxtaposed as if in a collage. Isolated and haunting, the images are at times everyday, at other times surreal, suggesting dreams or memories. The tone ranges from reassuring and gentle to disjointed and disturbing, but the volume was carefully composed by the author into an integral whole, not chronological but following its own poetic logic. This new translation makes Aichinger's critically acclaimed book, which has inspired poets in the German-speaking world for decades, available to English-language readers for the first time.

Poetically written and originally given as lectures, this is a moving essay collection from Durs Grÿnbein. In his four Lord Weidenfeld Lectures held in Oxford in 2019, German poet Durs Grÿnbein dealt with a topic that has occupied his mind ever since he began to perceive his own position within the past of his nation, his linguistic community, and his family: How is it possible that history can determine the individual poetic imagination and segregate it into private niches? Shouldn‿t poetry look at the world with its own sovereign eyes instead?   In the form of a collage or “photosynthesis,â€? in image and text, Grÿnbein lets the fundamental opposition between poetic license and almost overwhelming bondage to history appear in an exemplary way. From the seeming trifle of a stamp with the portrait of Adolf Hitler, he moves through the phenomenon of the “Fÿhrer‿s streetsâ€? and into the inferno of aerial warfare. In the end, Grÿnbein argues that we are faced with the powerlessness of writing and the realization, valid to this day, that comes from confronting history. As he muses, “There is something beyond literature that questions all writing.â€?

Four classical Greek myths retold with unexpected twists by an East German dissident.  Franz Fÿhmann‿s subversive retellings of four Greek legends were first published in East Germany in 1980. In them, Fÿhmann plumbs the ancient tales‿ depths and makes them his own. Attuned to conflict and paradox, he sheds light on the complexities of sex and love, art and beauty, politics and power. In the title story, the love of the goddess Eos for the mortal Tithonos reveals the blessing and curse of transience, while “Hera and Zeusâ€? probes the divine couple‿s tumultuous relationship and its devastating consequences for a world embroiled in war. Fÿhmann‿s unflinching account of Marsyas‿ flaying by Apollo has been widely read as a dissident political statement that has lost none of its incisive force. At times charged with sensuality, and at others honed to a keen analytical edge, Fÿhmann‿s shimmering prose is matched by Sunandini Banerjee‿s exquisite collages.

German author Friedrich Ani combines deep sorrow, human darkness, and breath-taking tension in his latest crime novel. Happiness is extinguished completely one cold November night when eleven-year-old Lennard Grabbe fails to return home. Thirty-four days later, he is found to have been murdered, and former inspector Jakob Franck, the protagonist of Friedrich Ani‿s previous novel The Nameless Day, is entrusted with delivering the most horrible news any parent could ever dream of, setting off a chain reaction of grief among family and friends.   As the special task force is unable to make any progress in the case and the family is unable to deal with the loss, Franck‿driven by the need to bring them clarity but also by the painful memories of all the unsolved murder cases from when he was still on active duty‿buries himself in witness statements and reports up to the point of exhaustion. He spends hours at the crime scene and employs his special technique of “thought sensitivity,â€? an abstract, intuitive process that may very well lead him to the “fossilâ€?‿that crucial piece of information he needs to solve the case.   Once again, Ani combines deep sorrow, human darkness, and breath-taking tension in a novel whose melancholy can hardly be surpassed.

In a world full of devils, the giant ape Kong defends what he loves the most. But who and what is this undomesticated animal? Might it reside within us? As we tread confidently, is this where the earth opens up beneath us?   In Kong‿s Finest Hour, Alexander Kluge explores anew the accessible spaces where Kong dwells within us and in our million-year-old past. The more than two hundred stories contained in this volume form a chronicle of connections that together survey these spaces using diverse perspectives. These include stories about the folds of Kong‿s nose, the voice of the author‿s mother, the poet Heinrich von Kleist and Jack the Ripper, the indestructability of the political, and the supercontinent Pangaea that once unified the earth. Dissolving theory into storytelling has been Kluge‿s lifelong pursuit, and this magnificent collection tells stories of people as well of things.   First in a series of Kluge‿s Chronicles forthcoming from Seagull Books, Kong‿s Finest Hour will delight those familiar with his writing as well as introduce readers to the brilliance of one of Germany‿s greatest living writers. Â

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Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is recognized as one of postwar German literature's most important novelists, poets, and playwrights. Nearly twenty years after her death, during an estate sale in Vienna, fifteen episodes of the Viennese radio drama The Radio Family were discovered. This book features these fifteen scripts.

One of Germany's best-known exponents of North Indian classical music, specifically dhrupad singing, Perer Pannke has traveled from his home in Germany to Varanasi, Delhi, Darbhanga, and the forests of Vrindaban to study classical Indian singing in the most famous gharanas - musical houses - of India. This title tells the story of a life in music.

A screenplay that was developed from an episode in the author's 1964 novel "Gantenbein", or "A Wilderness of Mirrors".

Over ten rainy nights, Thomas, an ex-barge-man who used to be skipper of his own boat, walks the muddy fields of the land-locked German interior and remembers the events that lost him his home, his boat, and his livelihood. In this novel, Thomas remembers childhood, his first love, and the warning of his grandfather: Beware the dark company.

Growing up in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a young Kurdish boy named Kerim has ample opportunity to witness the murderous repression that defined the era for thousands of Iraqis. This book follows Kerim from the fading memories of his childhood to his life running his family's roadside restaurant.

A book about bitter fates‿both already known and yet to unfold‿and the many kinds of organized machinery built to destroy people. Alexander Kluge‿s work has long grappled with the Third Reich and its aftermath, and the extermination of the Jews forms its gravitational center. Kluge is forever reminding us to keep our present catastrophes in perspective‿“calibratedâ€?‿against this historical monstrosity. Kluge‿s newest work is a book about bitter fates, both already known and yet to unfold. Above all, it is about the many kinds of organized machinery built to destroy people. These forty-eight stories of justice and injustice are dedicated to the memory of Fritz Bauer, a determined fighter for justice and district attorney of Hesse during the Auschwitz Trials. “The moment they come into existence, monstrous crimes have a unique ability,â€? Bauer once said, “to ensure their own repetition.â€? Kluge takes heed, and in these pages reminds us of the importance of keeping our powers of observation and memory razor sharp. Â

Reinhard Jirgl's strikingly individual novel The Fire Above, the Mountain Below demonstrates that he is not only unorthodox in his approach to language, but also difficult to pin down in terms of any genre. Weaving together elements of crime story, Cold War espionage, family tragedy, and a dystopian future, he creates a tapestry of fragile humanity and menacing inhumanity. The investigation of a series of gruesome killings takes a detective inspector into explorations of a secret intelligence programme in former East Germany and the role of a family with a tragic history. The more is uncovered, the more disorienting it becomes, and the reader is drawn into a complex web of discovery and suppression.

A series of sketches, depicting the last months of World War II and the first year of the subsequent British occupation of Austria.

Originally published as Der fliegende Berg, S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2006.

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Opens with a young couple enjoying a moment of carefree intimacy. Then the young woman, turning slightly more serious, asks her lover that fateful question, one that sounds so innocent but carries toxic seeds of jealousy: What was your life like before you met me?