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Intended afor a theatre on Mars, with a cast of nearly five-hundred and running to over two-hundred scenes, Karl Krauss apocalyptic tragedy The Last Days of Mankind is the longest, most elaborate play ever written. It is also a biting satirical commentary on the outbreak and subsequent course of World War I. Karl Kraus (1874-1936) ranks as one of the great satirists of 20th-century literature. In 1899 he established his own journal, Die Fackel (The Torch), to adrain the marsh of empty phrase-making. His wide-ranging oeuvre comprises essays, short stories, poetry and aphorisms, and culminated in the five-act play presented here. First published in 1920, The Last Days employs a collage of modernist techniques to evoke a despairing and darkly comical vision of the Great War from the perspective of Krauss hometown, Vienna. At its centre Kraus places a cabal of war mongering press barons and self-serving hacks, whose strategies of mass manipulation he holds responsible for the very atrocities they report on in dispatches, editorials and feuilletons. With this translation of the play in its entirety, Patrick Healy completes the work begun in 2014 when he published the first ever English-language version of the Prologue and Act I in the Kraus anthology In These Great Times: Selected Writings. The present edition includes an introduction and a glossary of names and relevant terms.

"e;There is hardly any other art which Europeans approach with so much mistrust as African art. The first move is to even deny that there is such a thing as 'art', and then to emphasise the distance which separates such products from the creations of the Europeans, with a contempt that leads to demeaning terminology [...] In his judgements on the Negroes the European retains one major postulate: his invincible, however exaggerated, superiority. Such disrespect for the Negro is de facto born of our ignorance and the source of the unjust harm done to him."e; Carl Einstein (1885-1940) was a pivotal figure in the development of European modernism that occurred during the years leading up to World War I. With the short, dense and revolutionary text of Negerplastik, Einstein undertook the first (European) critical response to African sculpture, challenging various prejudices and misconceptions around this subject. The work would quickly become a crucial text for the European avant-garde and today remains indispensable to understand the shift in discussion towards non-European art taking place at the time. The main aim in Negerplastik is to establish that African sculpture is art and that it cannot be understood by the system of sculptural production developed by Europeans who had constructed a master narrative of the development of art that was exclusionary of other cultures and productions. Originally published in 1915, the complete text of Negerplastik is presented here in a bilingual edition (English-German) for the first time, including all 108 original plates.

"e;What was it that distorted the faces across from him at the table, which had just been smiling? What did they mean, the squinting glances these people gave him and then tellingly and disapprovingly shared amongst each other? See? They even crouched together now, and began to whisper ... He listened intently ... and there you had it! Clearly, someone had spoken the word, the fatal word that towered over the firmament of his nights and slowly cut him into pieces, a remorseless machine even in its sound: 'Co-caine! ... Co-caine!' Bit by bit it cut him up, until someday soon he would be pulverised entirely."e; Walter Rheiner remains virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, despite a small but remarkable oeuvre which explores typical Expressionist themes - including metropolitan estrangement, intoxication and the horrors of trench warfare - in a manner every bit as daring and poignant as the work of better known contemporaries such as Trakl or Heym. Rheiner's was a short-lived career; most of his output was originally published between 1917-1918. An (unsuccessful) attempt to escape active service in World War I by posing as a drug addict marked the onset of his lifelong dependency on cocaine and, later, morphine. In the hallucinatory novella Cocaine, Rheiner provides the reader with an arresting close-up of Berlin's underbelly during the war years. The demise of the novella's plagued protagonist Tobias would foreshadow the author's own tragic end; he died at the age of 30 from an overdose of morphine. This bilingual edition, the first to present Rheiner in English translation, includes all of his known prose works as well as a small but representative sample of his poetry.

"e;Perhaps one day man will [...] see what a small occurrence such a world-war was when set against the spiritual self-mutilation of mankind by its newspapers, and how the war was at bottom just one of its manifestations [...] Allow me to overestimate the press. But if I maintain incorrectly that an epoch which takes the special edition so lightly as the event itself, and with excited nerves takes lies for facts, if it is not true that more blood has flown from telegrams than they claimed to contain, then let this blood be on my hands."e; Karl Kraus was a razor-sharp observer of fin-de-siecle Vienna. His work is inventive, subversive and immensely insightful. In 1899, Kraus established his own journal, Die Fackel (The Torch), and set out 'to drain the marsh of empty phrase-making', aiming his satire at favourite targets such as the press, psychoanalysis and Zionism. According to Kraus, much of the social and political divide in Vienna - where the issue of immigration was leading to mounting tensions and a virulent rise in anti-Semitism - was caused by the mass-circulation of the press, whose manipulation of public opinion by means of a language made up of mangled cliches and hackneyed phrases was corrosive of political and social life. This view dominates the despairing vision painted in his most outstanding creative achievement, The Last Days of Mankind, an apocalyptic drama written in response to the outbreak of World War I which runs to over 200 scenes and includes a cast of nearly 500. Alongside a selection of outstanding essays (including "e;A Crown for Zion"e;; "e;Salome"e; and "e;In These Great Times"e;), this collection includes the prologue and complete first act of The Last Days of Mankind, as well as a selection of aphorisms culled from Die Fackel. A large part of the work featured here is being presented in English translation for the first time. This edition also includes a chronology, suggested further reading and notes.