Fiction

By Anna SeghersTranslated by Lucy Jones “Anna Seghers was an admirable woman in many ways, but above all she was a remarkable humanist: she became a model of cultural resistance and ideological struggle who cut across borders, and who, still today, thanks to her work, transcends time and lives on in our memory. Anna Seghers’ novels don’t only recount stories of terror, escape, and oppression; they are a call to compassion and solidarity.” —Fernanda Melchor “Like Dante, Leo Tolstoy, and more recently Nadine Gordimer, Seghers was an epic writer who wrote against the grain of those in power. Her works evoke the spirit of her time in ways that most histories and documentaries cannot. Anyone who wants to know how people seeking justice can face adversity and still retain hope should read her books.” —Helen Fehervary, Jacobin “In this masterful novel, Anna Seghers examines how the private decisions of numerous individuals lead to fatal political consequences. She is that rare author whose books never age.” —Jenny Erpenbeck A chilling narrative about early Nazism in Germany through the eyes of a wrongfully accused young man, this 1930s novel provides a prescient look at the ways ordinary people are seduced by fascism, to the point of betraying their neighbors. It’s the summer of 1932, and Johann Schulz is accused of killing a police officer during a demonstration. Wanted for murder, Schulz leaves the city to seek shelter with his relatives in a small village on the Rhine. But the Nazis are beginning to recruit there, and it’s only a matter of time before the price on his head is too great a temptation for the villagers. Blood Money, a novel of suspense and political upheaval, tracks the nascent rise of the Hitler movement in a German village: the old farmers disinterested, then capitulating; the young entranced by the promise of action and the rare chance at advancement. Anna Seghers began writing Blood Money in 1932 and completed it in exile a year later, after she was blacklisted in Germany and forced to leave. In this prescient novel, Seghers’s dispassionate realism opens our eyes to the massive dimensions of the impending political and moral collapse. Paperback168 pagesNYRB Classics, 2026Originally Written in 1932-19335 x 8 inchesISBN 9798896230489Fiction

Blood Money

By Georg TraklTranslated by James Reidel Georg Trakl’s poetry has been praised by many, including Rainer Maria Rilke and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote that while he did not truly understand Trakl’s poems, they did have the tone of a ‘truly ingenious person’. 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 the First World War on the Eastern Front. In a refreshing contrast to previous translations of Trakl, James Reidel is mindful of how the poet himself wished to be read, emphasizing the order and content of the verses to achieve a musical effect. This volume is further enriched by Reidel’s research into the historicity of the poet’s language and his extensive annotation, making this the most comprehensive collection of Trakl’s poetry in English.Paperback462 pagesSeagull Books, 20195 x 8 x 1.25 inchesISBN 9780857427069Poetry

Collected Poems: Georg Trakl

By Marlen HaushoferTranslated by Shaun Whiteside "Effortlessly poignant. Haushofer's prose is like clear lake water: clean, crisp, seemingly simple yet with surprising depths. This novella's translation from German to English was worth the 75-year wait."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Finally available to English-language readers thanks to Shaun Whiteside’s precise translation… Haushofer inserts sharp observations about religion, gender inequity, overwhelming grief, and looming dangers. Haushofer expertly, poignantly unearths life beneath the surface."—Terry Hong, Booklist "A dreamy novella... In The Fifth Year, childhood bliss is edged with intimations of sorrow. Marili's is an honest sadness, slightly comic, but admirable in its intensity."— Becca Rothfeld, London Review of BooksA haunting story of a childhood in the Austrian countryside from the author of The Wall The Fifth Year follows a five-year-old girl, Marili, through each season of a single year on her grandparents’ farm in the mountains of Austria. Her grand-mother is a quiet, melancholic woman; her grandfather, with his calm, cheerful disposition, radiates warmth. Marili’s parents have died in the war, and she is left to discover—with curiosity, wonder, and fear—the beauty and darkness of a quiet pastoral life. Sinister elements lurk beneath the surface of The Fifth Year, in Marili’s dreams and fantasies, and this deceptively simple tale of childhood, told in effervescent and evocative prose, bubbles to life in Marlen Haushofer’s inimitably alarming style. Paperback80 pagesNew Directions, 20267.25 x 4.5 Inches ISBN 9780811239981Fiction, Novella

The Fifth Year

By Camille de Peretti Translated by Hildegarde Serle “A masterful fresco where family secrets, dazzling successes, thwarted loves, disappearances, and resounding dramas intertwine.”—MademoiselleLit “Poetic and mesmerizing!”—Grazia “A masterful family saga with love, family secrets, drama, and betrayal. A story that takes the reader from Vienna to New York, via Italy, from 1910 to the 1980s.”—Le Parisien “Through this great adventure novel, Camille de Peretti masterfully traverses eras and cities and constructs a story full of fury and emotion.”—Femme Actuelle A saga inspired by the incredible but true story of the iconic Klimt painting Painted in Vienna in 1910, Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of a Lady” was purchased by an anonymous collector in 1916, retouched by the master a year later, then stolen in 1997 before reappearing in the gardens of an Italian modern art museum in 2019. No art experts, museum curators, or police investigators know the identity of the young woman in the painting, nor the mysteries that surround the turbulent history of her portrait. From the streets of Vienna in 1900 to Texas in the 1980s, and from Manhattan during the Great Depression to contemporary Italy, de Peretti imagines the destiny of this young woman as well as that of her descendants, and creates a masterful fresco that intertwines family secrets, disappearances, and thwarted loves. Paperback288 pagesEuropa Editions, 20265.2 x 8.2 inchesISBN 9798889661788Literature, Historical Fiction

Portrait of an Unknown Woman

By Wolfgang KoeppenTranslated by Michael HoffmannWith a contribution by Pankaj Mishra "A triumph, a gem of postwar German literature that has remained obscure in the Anglophone world for too long... Ribald, irreverent, cutting, rhapsodic, and ultimately devastating portraits of German amnesia and hypocrisy." — Becca Rothfeld, The New Yorker "The prose, at least as it comes to us in Hofmann’s worked magic, is simultaneously wild, fluid, often flat-out gorgeous, and uncannily precise. Reading, one feels at the center of a living thing rather than looking on from a safe distance—receiving thoughts and sensations just as they’re hatching into the articulable."— Deborah Eisenberg, New York Review of Books The Hothouse traces the tragic final two days in the life of a minor German politician, Keetenheuve, a man disillusioned by the corruption of his country after WWII. Following his self-imposed exile during the war, Keetenheuve returns to the hothouse: the city of Bonn. Until this point he has led a life guided by principle and political optimism. Here, in spellbinding internal monologue and jarring montage, he meets his end. The Hothouse is an existential masterpiece and a portrait of a moral man crushed by an immoral world. Bitterly controversial at home and a cult writer abroad, Koeppen (1906– 1996) brought a volcanic modernist style to German literature that remains unparalleled to this day. His uniquely radical voice and breathtaking prose is rendered magnificently by Michael Hofmann. Paperback240 PagesNew Directions, 2026Originally published in 19535 x 8 inchesISBN 9780811240000Fiction, Post-WWII Germany

The Hothouse

By Robert SeethalerTranslated by Charlotte Collins "A gem of a novella"—Financial Times "A luminous imagining of a great musician's inner struggles."—Kirkus Review An intimate portrait of genius, love, and betrayal at the end of Gustav Mahler’s life. In the spring of 1911, Gustav Mahler—wrapped in a wool blanket—sits on the deck of the Amerika, sailing back to Europe. The ocean around him is gray and endless, the air sharp with wind and steel. Not yet fifty, Mahler is already a legend: in Vienna and New York, audiences fight for tickets to see the restless, small man who commands the most stubborn orchestra in the world. Yet his fame is shadowed by illness. His body is failing, his wife Alma has fallen in love with another man: the young architect Walter Gropius. Mahler has begged, humiliated himself, tried everything to keep her. Nothing worked, except the certainty of his approaching death. Alma has stayed, tending to him with care, perhaps to ease his final passage. On board, Mahler reflects on life, art, and above all, love. Finalist for the Deutscher Buchpreis and one of the most acclaimed German novels of recent years, Robert Seethaler’s The Last Movement is a haunting, tender portrait of a great artist confronting his farewell to life. Hardcover112 pagesEuropa Editions, 20265.1 x 2 x 7 inchesISBN 9798889661801Historical Fiction, Gustav Mahler, Alma Mahler

The Last Movement

By Theodor FontaneTranslated by Peter James Bowman PERFECT FOR FANS OF JANE AUSTEN: A seamstress and cavalry officer fall in love across class divides in this “sparkling, tender, delicately ironic” portrait of 19th-century Berlin (New York Review of Books). “A joy for its humanity, subtlety and visual immediacy.”—Independent From Germany’s greatest 19th-century novelist, this realist masterpiece interrogates the strict social codes of a rapidly changing era through a wistful struggle between love and obligation. Lene is an orphaned seamstress; Botho is a nobleman and an officer in one of the Prussian army’s most glittering regiments. But despite their differences of class and education, they fall quickly in love, spending a summer together in a clear-eyed, tender love affair before society’s demands force them cruelly apart. Now married to a wealthy cousin, Botho learns years later that Lene too has an opportunity to marry. Her ex-lover must choose between holding on to regret or letting go of the past – along with the possibility of getting Lene herself back. Unusually progressive for literature of the period, this masterwork of Fontane’s portrays a love story that defies class boundaries, full of tender irony and vivid evocations of a quickly expanding Berlin and its bucolic surroundings. Fontane bring sharp psychological insight to his achingly sympathetic portrayal of two lovers torn between their hearts and the obligations of social circumstance. Paperback 208 pages Pushkin Press Classics, 20265.08 x 7.76 inchesISBN 9781805331612Literature

On Tangled Paths

By Johann Wolfgang von GoetheTranslated by John Kent A fresh translation of the poetry of German Romantic and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. “Germany’s greatest man of letters… and the last true polymath to walk the earth” — George Eliot Here, in this selection of his poetry, is representation of Goethe’s life from childhood to old age: full of travel, romantic fixations, curiosity, nostalgia, deep thought, and above all, writing. Goethe is undoubtedly Germany’s greatest poet, as Shakespeare is England’s. This fresh translation offers the reader an introduction to Goethe’s genius. And what a genius! Novelist, dramatist, philosopher and above all poet; a scientist with deep interests in Nature, in particular the human body, forestry, geology, botany and light; a courtier and in later life considered a sage, he was also a very frequent letter writer, no mean artist, and a man who was able throughout his life to renew and rejuvenate himself creatively, working out many of his life’s problems through his writings. For English speakers he is probably best known as the author of Faust, a vast dramatic work mainly in verse which occupied him on and off throughout his long life, as well as The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel of youthful despair which became the sacred text of the Romantic movement. This volume brings together his very personal lyric poetry, hewing as close to the original form, content, and rhyme schemes as possible in English. Paperback256 pagesPushkin Press Classics, 20265.1 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781805333401Poetry, German Authors

The Wanderer's Song: Essential Poems

By Joseph Roth Translated by David Le Vay “An absorbing, dark, beautifully written” novel on the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire “written with the melancholy wit and grace of Gogol” (New Statesman, The Times) This deeply moving, deeply philosophical story set in Ukraine touches on timeless themes of uprooted identity, destiny, and loneliness Widely praised and rarely available in English, Weights and Measures builds on Joseph Roth’s most famous work, The Radetzky March. Among his final works, this fable about the disintegration of a good man transports us back in time to Eastern Europe’s borderlands in the early 20th century. In this haunting and poetic novel, scrupulous artillery officer Anselm Eibenschütz is persuaded by his wife to leave behind his job as an artilleryman in the Austro-Hungarian army and take up a civilian post as Inspector of Weights and Measures in a secluded territory near the Russian border. Once there, his discipline and quiet dignity begin to dissolve as he encounters a shadowy world of smugglers, fugitives, and runaways. A deeply felt commentary on the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Weights and Measures registers on both a historical and personal level to portray the slow capitulation of a good man to insidious small-time corruption and to his own destructive passion. Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: outstanding classic storytelling from around the world, in a stylishly original series design. From newly rediscovered gems to fresh translations of the world’s greatest authors, this series includes such authors as Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Gaito Gazdanov. Paperback112 pagesRandom House, Inc., 2024Originally published in 19375.1 x 0.48 x 7.78 inchesISBN 9781805330653Literary Fiction, Literature

Weights and Measures

By Thomas MannTranslated by Lesley Chamberlain A sumptuous new translation of the sublime novella of desire, obsession, and one man’s downfall; another classic from the author of THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. “Probably the greatest of modern German novelists.” ―The New York Times One of the pre-eminent works of modern European literature, this enthralling story of desire, beauty and infatuation follows the erudite, respectable writer Gustav Aschenbach’s descent into obsession. Aschenbach has always lived a life of structured routine, but he has begun to be troubled by diminishing creative inspiration from his strict writing schedule. While walking in a cemetery north of Munich, he has a dizzying vision which prompts him to abandon his settled life and travel south to Venice. On checking into his hotel, Aschenbach notices a young Polish boy of perfect, sculptural beauty: Tadzio. As he lingers on at the hotel, Aschenbach falls into an ever-deeper infatuation with the youth, whose curled blond hair and porcelain face fill him with rapture, and even seem to cure his stubborn writer’s block. Ignoring whispered warnings of a cholera outbreak in Venice, Aschenbach stays at the hotel and follows Tadzio with increasing obsession, his mind swirling with mad desire. Classical in structure yet roiled by disturbing passion, Death in Venice is an enormously powerful story of one man’s undoing. Full of coiled tension and vivid inner conflict, it is one of Thomas Mann’s greatest masterpieces, and appears here in a lively new translation by Lesley Chamberlain. Paperback112 pagesPushkin Press Classics, 20265.09 x 0.36 x 7.77 inchesISBN 9781805332688Literary Classics, Fiction

Death in Venice

By Milo Todd 2026 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER Finalist for the New England Book Award “Reminiscent of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See . . . Heart-stopping in its suspense and dramatic reveals.” —The Boston Globe “In dual timelines, Milo Todd thoughtfully portrays the plight of queer and transgender people in Germany before and after World War II.” —Becky Meloan, The Washington Post A moving and deeply humane story about a trans man who must relinquish the freedoms of prewar Berlin to survive first the Nazis then the Allies, all while protecting the ones he loves In 1932 Berlin, a trans man named Bertie and his friends spend carefree nights at the Eldorado Club, the epicenter of Berlin’s thriving queer community. An employee of the renowned Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute of Sexual Science, Bertie works to improve queer rights in Germany and beyond. But everything changes when Hitler rises to power. The Institute is raided, the Eldorado is shuttered, and queer people are rounded up. Bertie barely escapes with his girlfriend, Sofie, to a nearby farm. There they take on the identities of an elderly couple and live for more than a decade in isolation. In the final days of the war, with their freedom in sight, Bertie and Sofie find a young trans man collapsed on their property, still dressed in Holocaust prison clothes. They vow to protect him—not from the Nazis, but from the Allied forces who are arresting queer prisoners while liberating the rest of the country. Ironically, as the Allies’ vise grip closes on Bertie and his family, their only salvation is to flee to the United States. Brimming with hope, resilience, and the enduring power of community, The Lilac People tells an extraordinary story inspired by real events and recovers an unknown moment of World War II and trans history. Paperback320 PagesCounterpoint, 20265.5 x 8.25 inchesISBN 9781640097667 Historical Fiction, LGBT History

The Lilac People: A Novel (Paperback)

By Hannah ArendtTranslated and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill "A new volume of [Arendt’s] poetry reveals that the author of sobering works like The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition was writing ardent and intimate verse in her off-hours."—Srikanth Reddy, The Paris Review A landmark literary event, What Remains collects Arendt’s complete poetic oeuvre—never before published in English. Internationally renowned as one of the twentieth century’s foremost public intellectuals, Hannah Arendt was also intensely private. Though she often acknowledged that the language of poetry—especially that of Dickinson, Goethe, and Lowell—informed her work, only a few people knew that Arendt herself wrote poems. In fact, between 1923 and 1961, Arendt wrote seventy-four poems, many of them signposts in an otherwise unwritten autobiography. For nearly forty years after her death, these poems remained hidden among the archives of the Library of Congress, until 2011, when they were rediscovered by scholar and translator Samantha Rose Hill. Now, for the first time in English, Hill and Genese Grill present Arendt’s poems in chronological order, taking us from the zenith of the Weimar Republic to the Cold War, and from Marburg, Germany, to New York’s Upper West Side. Throughout, Arendt uses poetry to mark moments of joy, love, loss, and reflection. In “W. B.,” written in 1942, she remembers Walter Benjamin, who died near the French-Spanish border while attempting to flee the Nazis: “Gentle whispering melodies / Sound from the darkness. / We listen so we can let go.” So, too, she reflects on mutability and transience in 1946: “I know that the houses have fallen. / We entered the world in them, wonderfully sure, that they / were more durable than ourselves.” She tries to understand her place in the world: “Ironically foolish, / I’ve forgotten nothing, / I know the emptiness, / I know the burden, / I dance, I dance / In ironic splendor.” A gift to all readers of Arendt, this stunning, dual-language edition provides an unparalleled view into the inner sanctum of one of our most original thinkers. Hardcover208 pagesLiveright, 20245.8 x 0.8 x 8.6 inchesISBN 9781324090526 Poetry, Hannah Arendt

What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt

By Thea von Harbou This city of the future encompasses two worlds: that of the hedonistic ruling class and that of a segregated subculture, toilers in a mechanized underworld who labor to provide the rich with their pleasures. When a charismatic leader arises, she seeks a savior to unite the disparate social orders. "Between the brain that plans and the hands that build," she declares, "there must be a mediator―the heart."Thea von Harbou, creator of the screenplay for Fritz Lang's iconic 1927 film, wrote this novel to expand upon the movie's ideas and concepts. Vivid in description, rich in characterization and symbolism, the story draws upon ancient myths to form a compelling vision of the future. Noted science-fiction authority Forrest J. Ackerman hailed the book as "a work of genius," and a century after its initial publication Metropolis continues to captivate readers.Paperback224 pages Dover Publications, Reprint edition, 2015 5.12 x 0.39 x 7.87 inchesISBN 9780486795676Literature, Film, History

Metropolis

By Gabriele TergitTranslated by Sophie Duvernoy "A blend of page-turner and the highest literary quality." ―Der Tagesspiegel "Anyone who reads it will accompany the characters for many decades and take some of them very much to their hearts." ―Berliner Zeitung Three generations of German Jewish family undergo the tumult, upheaval, and brutality of nineteenth and twentieth-century history in this panoramic and skillfully nuanced family drama, rich with gossip and incident, capturing a Germany now lost to time. Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers is a novel, at once epic and intimate, about the lives and fates of three generations of a German Jewish family. Beginning in 1878 and ending in 1948, we follow the Effingers, a family of modest craftsmen from southern Germany, who are joined through marriage to two families of high-society financiers in Berlin, the Goldschmidts and the Oppners. The Effingers soon rise to prominence as one of the most important German industrialist families in Berlin, but with the outbreak of World War I, they fall on hard times and must navigate the tumultuous changes of the Weimar Republic. Full of parties and drama and delicious gossip, and featuring a kaleidoscopic cast of characters, Effingers is a keenly observed account of German Jewish life in all its richness and complexity. Tergit's precise and limpid prose dazzles in Sophie Duvernoy's elegant translation. Woefully underrated when it first appeared in 1951, and only recently rediscovered in Germany, Effingers is a meditation on identity and nationality that establishes Tergit as one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century. Paperback864 pagesNYRB Classics, 20255 x 8 inchesISBN 9781681379791Literature, Fiction

Effingers

By Irmgard KeunTranslated by Kathie von Ankum “A highly original, extremely stylish novel...The narrator is a young woman whose irreverent and funny voice you will not easily forget.” —Daniel Kehlmann, New York Times Book Review “A young girl navigates interwar German society and the expectations—or lack thereof—placed upon women, in this poignant, melancholy novel from the late Keun…[This] heartbreaking story of dashed hopes is one that still has the power to affect and inspire.” —Publishers Weekly This enthralling tale of a “material girl” in 1930s Berlin is the masterpiece of a literary icon, rediscovered and restored to the same heights as such luminaries as Isherwood and Brecht. In 1931 a young woman writer living in Germany penned her answer to Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the era of cinematic glamour: The Artificial Silk Girl. Though a Nazi censorship board banned Irmgard Keun’s work in 1933 and destroyed all existing copies, the novel survived, as fresh and relevant today as the day it was written. The Artificial Silk Girl is the story of Doris, beautiful and striving, who vows to write down all that happens to her as the star of her own life story. But instead of scripting what she hopes will be a quick rise to fame and fortune as either an actress or the mistress/wife of a wealthy man, she describes a slow descent into near prostitution and homelessness. Prewar Berlin is not the dazzling and exciting city of promise it seems; Doris unwittingly reveals a bleak, seamy urban landscape. Paperback224 pagesOther Press, 20255.24 x 8 inchesISBN 9781635425086Fiction, Literature

The Artificial Silk Girl: A Novel

By Nelio BiedermannTranslated from the German by Jamie Bulloch “Lázár is an exquisite and masterly pronouncement that a gifted young writer walks among us.” —Patti Smith An “astonishing…disturbingly dreamlike” (Daniel Kehlmann, The Director) debut, inspired by the author’s own family story—a gothic, inter-generational family saga capturing the rise and fall of an aristocratic Hungarian family against the backdrop of the two world wars. At the turn of the 20th century, the Lázárs welcome their newest member in their rural summer estate, surrounded by a menacingly dark, enchanting forest. Lajos von Lázár is a baby boy with translucent skin and light-blue eyes who looks nothing like the rest of his family. Sándor, the imposing patriarch, is ashamed of his son’s peculiarity. Ilona finds her baby brother quite ugly. Mária is terrified that her son’s uncanny resemblance to the stagehand who died a couple weeks earlier might spell disaster. While Imre, Sándor’s brother whose otherworldly foresight is often confused for insanity, is struck by visions of a great catastrophe. Lajos’s birth is emblematic of the many secrets, affairs, and peculiar otherworldly happenings that plague the Lázárs. As the decades go by, they will continue to fall prey to their desires, leading grand lives, and experiencing even greater tragedies as they’re swept by the tides of war and revolution that befall their country. But time and again, in the lighter years, extraordinary love and hope shine through. Masterfully written and deeply haunting, Lázár is a magisterial novel that presents the sweeping history of a nation through the lives of one extraordinary family. Hardcover272 pagesSimon & Schuster, 20265.5 x 1 x 8.38 inchesISBN 9781668200551Literature

Lázár

By Daniel KehlmannTranslated by Ross Benjamin SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE • A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR • AN NYPL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “Nothing short of brilliant.” —The Wall Street Journal From “a surpassingly gifted storyteller” (The New York Times), a visionary novel inspired by the life of film director G.W. Pabst, who fled to Hollywood to resist the Nazis only to return to his homeland to create propaganda films for the German Reich. An artist’s life, a pact with the devil, and the dangerous illusions of the silver screen. G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him. When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement. Kehlmann’s latest oeuvre explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator. Paperback352 pagesS&S/Summit Books, 20265.5 x 0.9 x 8.38 inchesISBN 9781668087800 Historical Fiction, Cinema

The Director [Paperback]

By Daniel KehlmannTranslated by Ross Benjamin “Nothing short of brilliant.” —The Wall Street Journal “A surpassingly gifted storyteller.” —The New York Times From “one of the brightest, most pleasure-giving writers at work today” (Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize–winning author), a visionary tale inspired by the life of film director G.W. Pabst, who fled to Hollywood to resist the Nazis only to be forced to return to his homeland and create propaganda films for the German Reich. An artist’s life, a pact with the devil, and the dangerous illusions of the silver screen. G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him. When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement. Kehlmann’s latest oeuvre explores the complicated relationships and distinctions between art and power, beauty and barbarism, cog and conspirator. Hardcover352 pagesSimon & Schuster/Summit Books, 20256 x 1.5 x 9 inchesISBN 9781668087794Historical Fiction, Cinema

The Director

By Rainer Maria RilkeTranslated from the German by Edward Snow “The most trustworthy and exhilarating of Rilke’s contemporary translators.” —Michael Dirda, Washington Post A gorgeous new translation of one of the strongest inaugural works in twentieth century poetry. Long hailed as a masterwork of modern German literature, The Book of Hours (1905) marks the origin of Rainer Maria Rilke’s distinctive voice and vision—where clarity of diction meets unexpected imagery and first-person poetry discovers its full lyric possibility. In these audacious poems, a devout but candid speaker addresses an ultimately unknowable deity, passing through love, fear, guilt, anger, bewilderment, loneliness, tenderness, and exaltation in his search for meaning. In this dual-language edition, Edward Snow, “the most trustworthy and exhilarating of Rilke’s contemporary translators” (Michael Dirda, Washington Post), makes Rilke’s achievement accessible as never before in English. Snow retains a striking fidelity to the German text while also conveying the captivating psychological presence that animates Rilke’s best poems. Paperback368 pagesText in German and EnglishW.W. Norton, 2026Originally published in 19055.5 x 8.3 inchesISBN 9781324123460Poetry, Rainer Maria Rilke

The Book of Hours

By Rainer Maria RilkeTranslated by Geoffrey Lehmann “The New Poems are for me Rilke’s greatest poems, written under the shadow of ‘mon grand ami Auguste Rodin’ to whom their second volume was dedicated. They are ‘method’ poems. Not waiting for inspiration, but taking the handicraft of a poem, and setting himself subjects, the way a shoemaker might, or a sculptor. ‘Thing-poems,’ Dinggedichte, poems about things, but also poems that are ‘a thing.’ The two volumes are, in my view, two of the most beautifully made poetic sequences ever.” —Michael Hofmann ”In Rilke not only do the stones and trees become human—as they have done always and everywhere poems have been made—but humans become things and nameless beings and only then gain their ultimate humanity.” —Robert Musil Fresh, beautiful new translations of one of the most important poets of all time, publishing in celebration of the 150th anniversary of Rainer Maria Rilke’s birth. Rilke is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, revered throughout the world. Geoffrey Lehmann has selected fifty of Rilke’s finest poems from the two volumes of New Poems, considered the center of gravity of Rilke’s achievement. Lehmann’s refined ear and perfect mastery of English verse form give his renderings of Rilke a precision and poise equal to that of the German originals. In celebration of the 150th anniversary of Rilke’s birth, a master poet lives anew. Paperback128 pagesNYRB Poets, 20254.5 x 7 inchesISBN 9781681379944Poetry

Fifty Poems

By Helen Wolff and Marion Detjen Translated by Tristram Wolff and Jefferson Chase A lush autobiographical story of young love, 1930s Côte d’Azur, and rising fascism in Nazi Germany—by the famed publisher of Calvino, Pasternak, and Gunter Grass “Wolff may not have wanted her book to be seen by outside eyes, but her summer of love is a tale so rich, evocative and forbidden, it is irresistible.”—British Vogue In a giddy rush, a young woman and her older lover leave 1930s Berlin for a summer vacation on the Côte d’Azur. As they drive along stunning bays, linger over sumptuous meals and steal kisses on the street, they seem marvelously in sync, each enchanted by the other. But as she observes her lover’s wandering eye and rigid world-view, the woman decides to leave in search of a cottage of her own near Saint-Tropez. There, amid the vineyards and lemon trees, she will forge startling new connections and pass an unforgettable summer of independence and freedom. Background for Love is an irresistible autobiographical novel by the great publisher Helen Wolff, who together with her husband, Kurt Wolff, Kafka’s first publisher, set up Pantheon Books in America after fleeing Nazi Germany. In the fascinating companion essay, historian Marion Detjen, the author’s great-niece, delves into Helen’s path to writing and the autobiographical context of the novel in her early life with Kurt. Helen is remembered as a great publisher, a multilingual reader who brought authors such as Italo Calvino and Georges Simenon to English-speaking readers – only now is her own reputation as a writer coming to the fore. Recently recovered from the archive and translated for the 1st time by Tristram Wolff, the author’s grandson, this is a a fast-paced, highly intense, and emotionally gripping novel of passion and self-discovery. Paperback256 pagesPushkin Press Classics, 20255.06 x 7.76 inches ISBN 9781805330745Literature, Historical Fiction

Background for Love

By E.T.A. HoffmannTranslated by Peter WortsmanMacabre and fantastical, Hoffmann’s wildly imaginative tales offer an unflinching view of human nature and sing clearer than ever in a masterful new translationWhether a surrealist exploration of the anxieties surrounding automation, or a mystery concerning a goldsmith, missing jewels, and a spate of murders, each tale in this collection reveals the complexities of human desire and fear.Hoffman, whose most famous work is “The Nutcracker,” is often compared to Edgar Allan Poe. Hoffman’s massive influence qualifies him as the godfather of the German Romantic Movement which led to the horror genre.The macabre, fantastical nature of his subject matter inspired a broad swath of culture, with two of the longer stories in this collection “The Sandman” and “The Automaton” influencing Philip K. Dick’s original inspiration for Blade Runner. The murder mystery “Mademoiselle de Scudéry” is perhaps one of the earliest prototypes of the detective genre story.Music and madness flow through E.T.A. Hoffmann’s phantasmagoric stories. The ringing of crystal bells heralds the arrival of a beguiling snake, and a student’s descent into lunacy; a young man abandons his betrothed for a woman who plays the piano skillfully but seems worryingly wooden; a counselor’s daughter must choose between singing and her life.Peter Wortsman’s masterful new translation allows Hoffmann’s distinct and influential style to shine, while breathing new life into stories that seem both familiar and uncanny.Paperback300 pagesArchipelago Books, 20236 x 6.95 inchesISBN 9781953861702Literature, Gothic, Horror

The Golden Pot

By Stefan Zweig “I found it terrible, yet at the same time touching, for in all the years of the war I had not seen so perfect and pure an expression of bliss on any German face.” An ostensibly whimsical story about the adventures of a Berlin art dealer, Stefan Zweig’s The Invisible Collection is a powerful evocation of the condition of Germany between the wars. When Zweig’s anonymous narrator sets off to the provinces in search of a lucrative bargain, he finds himself caught up in the slow unfolding of a family tragedy—and is confronted with a unique reminder of the power of art…Eris Gems make available in the form of beautifully produced saddle-stitched booklets a series of outstanding short works of fiction and non-fiction.Paperback36 pagesEris Gems, 2024Originally published in 19257.68 x 4.33 inchesISBN 9781912475865 Literary Fiction

The Invisible Collection

By Bram Stoker“I felt a warm rasping at my throat, then came a consciousness of the awful truth, which chilled me to the heart and sent the blood surging up through my brain.”In this intriguing literary fragment—published seventeen years after Bram Stoker’s most famous novel—an English visitor to southern Germany suffers a terrifying ordeal on Walpurgis Nacht: the night when, according to local tradition, supernatural horrors are set free to walk the earth. But perhaps most chilling of all is the appearance of a mysterious telegram purporting to guarantee the Englishman’s safety, a telegram sent by a certain ‘Dracula’…Eris Gems make available in the form of beautifully produced saddle-stitched booklets a series of outstanding short works of fiction and non-fiction.Paperback32 pagesEris Gems, 2024Originally published in 19147.68 x 4.29 inchesISBN 9781912475797 Gothic Fiction

Dracula's Guest

By Walter Benjamin Translated by Harry Zohn “I fully realize that my discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is behind the times, in your distrust of the collector type. Nothing is further from my mind than to shake either your conviction or your distrust.” Walter Benjamin was one of the great cultural critics of the twentieth century. In Unpacking My Library he offers a strikingly personal meditation on his career as a book collector and on the strange relations that spring up between objects and their owners. Witty, erudite and often moving, this book will resonate with bibliophiles of all kinds.Eris Gems make available in the form of beautifully produced saddle-stitched booklets a series of outstanding short works of fiction and non-fiction.Paperback24 pagesEris Gems, 2022Originally published in 19317.64 x 4.33 inchesISBN 9781912475841 Essays

Unpacking My Library

By Hermann Hesse “Hesse is a writer whose peculiar vision is worth inspecting. His world is shadowy and close to areas of the heart that will probably never see light. But his vision is a rare one, as commendable for its humane solicitude as for its strangeness and unearthly color.” —National Review "What Catcher in the Rye has come to mean for America's younger generation, Demian proved to be for Germany's early post-WWI youth. . . . A quite believable, fascinating, moving portrait of youth." —Kirkus Reviews An acclaimed, influential, and visionary novel from Hermann Hesse, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Demian tells the dramatic story of Emil Sinclair. Docile and unquestioning, Emil follows a precious schoolmate—the charismatic Max Demian—on a shocking decent into a secret and dangerous world of petty crime and revolt against convention. And it is there in the shadows that a formerly complacent and uncomplicated young man achieves a miraculous awakening to adulthood. The novel includes an introduction by Thomas Mann. Paperback 176 pages Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 19995 x 8 inches ISBN 9780060931919 Literature

Demian (Perennial Classics)

By Rainer Maria Rilke Edited by Peter Washington Translated by J.B. Leishman The Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets hardcover series is popular for its compact size and reasonable price which does not compromise content. Poems: Rilke contains poems from The Book of Images; New Poems; Requiem for a Friend; Poems, 1906-1926; French Poems; The Life of Mary; Sonnets to Orpheus; The Duino Elegies; Letters to a Young Poet; and an index of first lines.Hardcover256 pagesEveryman's Library, 19964.1 x 6.25 InchesISBN 9780679450986Poetry, Literature

Rilke: Poems (Everyman's Library)

Edited by Diana Secker Tesdell “An excellent new anthology. . . . I’ve long admired Tesdell’s Everyman’s Pocket Classic thematic anthologies for their judicious story selections. Like some of the artists depicted in this one, she creates works that are pleasing, beautiful and surprising.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Stories of Art and Artists gathers two centuries of classic stories from around the world. From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful” and Albert Camus’s “The Artist at Work” to Bernard Malamud’s “Rembrandt’s Hat” and Aimee Bender’s “The Color Master,” the tales collected here range from haunting fables about the power of art to vivid portraits of those who create.Writers have long been fascinated by the idea of artistic genius, the relationship between portraits and their subjects, the inspirational role of muses, and the effects on artists of ambition, failure, and success. Art forms featured in these pages include sculpture, pottery, architecture, miniatures, landscapes, portraits, and abstract painting, illumined in brilliant stories by such great writers as Honoré de Balzac, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Marguerite Yourcenar, John Berger, William Boyd, Doris Lessing, Valerie Martin, Julian Barnes, Orhan Pamuk, and A. S. Byatt. Their dazzling literary evocations of the visual arts—using one art form to reflect on another—make Stories of Art and Artists an irresistible gift for lovers of art of all kinds.Hardcover400 pagesEveryman's Library, 20144.25 x 7.25 inchesISBN 9780375712494Short Stories, Fiction

Stories of Art and Artists

Edited by Philip Hensher Berlin, in the words of Philip Hensher, editor of this anthology, 'has always been a city of desperate modernity', both in terms of urban architecture—largely a creation of the progressive 19th century, laid waste by World War II, temporary home of the infamous Wall—and in ways of living and behaving. As early as the 1920s it was the gay capital of Europe; the Communist East/free West barrier presented unique problems for a divided population; and in the 1990s, in the aftermath of reunification, the cheap, run-down city became a vibrant centre for creative artists. 'The sense of making it up as you go along is never far away in Berlin.' The stories in this volume are the product of this series of multiple rebirths from the viewpoint of both insiders and outsiders. From pre-1914 there are contributions from Theodor Fontane and Robert Walser; from the Weimar Republic, Alexander Döblin, Vladimir Nabokov, Erich Kästner, Ernst Haffner, Irmgard Keun and Christopher Isherwood; from the Third Reich, Thomas Wolfe, Hans Fallada and Heinz Rein; from the Cold War era, Peter Schneider, Thomas Brussig, Len Deighton, Christa Wolf and Ian McEwan; from post-reunification, Günter Grass, Wladimir Kaminer, Chloe Aridjis, Uwe Timm, Kevin Barry, Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Jenny Erpenbeck. Hardcover400 pagesEveryman Publishing, 2019Originally published in 19794.9 x 1.2 x 7.5 inchesISBN 9781101908174Short Stories, Fiction

Berlin Stories

Edited by Emily Fragos Art and Artists: Poems is a sumptuous collection of visions in verse—the work of centuries of poets who have used their own art form to illuminate art created by others.A wide variety of visual art forms have inspired great poetry, from painting, sculpture, and photography to tapestry, folk art, and calligraphy. Included here are poems that celebrate Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, and Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Here are such well-known poems as John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” Homer’s immortal account of the forging of the shield of Achilles, and Federico García Lorca’s breathtaking ode to the surreal paintings of Salvador Dalí. Allen Ginsberg writes about Cezanne, Anne Sexton about van Gogh, Billy Collins about Hieronymus Bosch, and Kevin Young about Jean-Michel Basquiat. Here too are poems that take on the artists themselves, from Michelangelo and Rembrandt to Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe. Altogether, this brilliantly curated anthology proves that a picture can be worth a thousand words—or a few very well-chosen ones.Hardcover256 pagesRandom House, 20124.4 x 6.48 inchesISBN 9780307959386 Poetry, Anthology

Art and Artists: Poems (Everyman's Pocket Poet Series)

By E. T. A. Hoffmann Translated by Joachim Neugroschel One of six beloved Christmas classics in collectible hardcover editions Written in 1816 by one of the leaders of German Romanticism for his children, nephews, and nieces, The Nutcracker captures better than any other story a child’s wonder at Christmas. The gift of a handsomely decorated nutcracker from a mysterious uncle sets the stage for a Christmas Eve like no other for the little girl Marie. That night, Marie’s extraordinary present comes to life, defends her from the taunting Mouse King, and whisks her off to the Kingdom of Dolls. The inspiration for the classic ballet, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s irresistible tale of magic and childhood adventure continues to captivate readers of all ages. Today, many of the most enchanting symbols of Christmas, from nutcrackers to sugar plums to mistletoe, are still imbued with the power of this story. Hardcover128 pagesPenguin Classics, 2014Originally Published in 18165.12 x 7.58 inchesISBN 9780143122500Winter Classics, Holiday Fiction

The Nutcracker

By Anna Gmeyner Translated by Kate Phillips Preface by Eva Ibbotson Written in 1936-7 by a young Austrian playwright living in exile in London, Manja opens, radically, with five conception scenes all set on the same night in 1920. In the midst of the turbulent Germany of the Weimar Republic, it goes on, equally dramatically, to describe the lives of the children and their families up until 1933 when the Nazis came to power. The four boys and one girl, Manja, become friends, but their companionship is doomed because of the differences between their parents; one father is a left-wing activist, another a Nazi, another a financier, another a Jewish musician. Yet Manja is far from being a political novel. Its startling originality lies in the way the the political background is perceived, steadily, from the child's point of view. It has been compared with PB no. 152 Crooked Cross by Sally Carson, who was born the same year as Anna Gmeyner. 'What is so unusual,' wrote the playwright Berthold Viertel in 1938, 'is the way the novel contrasts the children's community - in all its idealism, romanticism, decency and enchantment - with the madhouse community of the adults.' Meanwhile the Manchester Guardian called it 'a remarkable novel, a book of truth and tenderness' and the New York Times referred to it as 'a tale of terrible beauty'. The Preface is by the author's daughter, writer Eva Ibbotson; the new translation is by Kate Phillips.Hardcover552 pagesPersephone Books, 2003Originally published in 1939‎5.35 x 7.64 inchesISBN 9781903155295Literary Fiction

Manja

By Elisabeth de Waal Anita, who has lived in Austria through the Second World War, comes to live in a large English country house in the early 1950s. She forms a close bond with its elderly owner, Mr Barlow, and another with his grandson Tony. But what does the future hold for any of them, for the house, and for England itself? Paperback322 pagesPersephone Press, 20195.51 x 1.1 x 7.48 inchesISBN 9781910263211 Literature

Milton Place

By Sally CarsonPreface by Laura Freeman Crooked Cross describes, through the eyes of one ordinary family, the Nazis’ growth in power between December 1932 and August 1933. It is extraordinarily prescient, anticipating all the horrors they were about to inflict on the world, and in this respect it joins a small group of novels, PB no. 39 Manja and PB no. 136 The Oppermanns among them, which were written to try to alert the world to what was happening. The main focus of the novel is on disaffected German youth: it shows with great subtlety that by the early 1930s there was huge unemployment, and a corresponding feeling of futility, and that what the Nazis did so skillfully was to provide a sense of purpose. Crooked Cross is an incisive account on why some young men who feel disaffected, lost or ignored turn towards authoritarian governments. Hardcover380 pagesPersephone Press, 2025Originally published in 19345.51 x 1.1 x 7.48 inchesISBN 9781910263426Literature

Crooked Cross

By Olga Tokarczuk Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER! A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR “A folk horror story with a deceptively light and knowing tone … elegant and genuinely unsettling.” —The New York Times Book Review The Nobel Prize winner’s latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone—or something—seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world. Little does the newcomer realize, as he tries to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target. A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, with signature boldness, inventiveness, humor, and bravura. Paperback320 pagesRiverhead Books, 20255.2 x 8 inchesISBN 9780593712955Historical Fiction

The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story [Paperback]

By Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, translated by Philip Boehm A prophetic lost classic from interwar Germany, now translated into English for the first time, following a group of Berliners on the skids as their nation unravels. Berlin in the 1920s is the largest city in Europe, a cultural mecca, and a political mess: a hedonistic Babylon, though there’s little glamor for the hundreds of thousands out of work, the war wounded, the prostitutes, and the beggars. Come evening they too want to shed their cares at the Jolly Huntsman pub, where they gather to drink, dance, and reassert their pride. But there’s disaster lurking in the alleys and flophouses, a disaster that the twenty-two-year-old author Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz saw coming for his nation. In this dark comedy of petty theft, soapbox speeches, and bar fights is the disarray of a country devouring itself. Tragically, Germany’s self-destruction engulfed the author, who was killed five years after finishing this novel. When Boschwitz’s The Passenger was rediscovered in 2021, it was heralded as a masterpiece that captured the terror of the Nazi reign. Now, Berlin Shuffle—his literary debut from 1937, finally available in English, with a preface by the preeminent translator Philip Boehm—brings to life the society that would enable fascism’s takeover. The triumph of one of world literature’s spectacular talents, Berlin Shuffle is a dire warning sent from a pivotal moment in history to our own time. Hardcover256 pagesMetropolitan Books, 20255.38 x 1 x 8.25 inchesISBN 9781250869494 Literature, Fiction

Berlin Shuffle

By Hermann HesseTranslated by Basil Creighton A semi-surreal masterpiece about a man who believes his life is irredeemable until he ventures into the world of pleasure. The quest for self-discovery never ends, especially for Harry Haller―better known as the Steppenwolf. After a life spent in self-imposed isolation, Harry meets the mysterious Hermine and becomes captivated by her intoxicating power. Through their nighttime adventures, the Steppenwolf experiences the decadent underbelly of the bourgeois society he always despised. Harry becomes a man divided―lost in a surreal underground world of pleasure and set on a collision course with his innermost desires. Paperback256 pagesVintage Classics, 2025Originally published in 19275 3x16 x 8 inchesISBN 9798217006946 Literary Fiction, German Modernism

Steppenwolf

"All Quiet on the Western Front" was the focus of our Literatur Café event in January 2026. To buy tickets to future events and find out more, please visit our Programs page here.By Erich Maria Remarque Translated by Kurt Beals "It is very fortunate that Kurt Beals has written a new translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and produced a crisp, fresh and very much more faithful to the German original version that brings new life to one of the classic novels to come out of the First World War, and makes it well worth reading again, or reading for the first time. Beals’s translation makes it clear why the book has sold millions of copies in almost every language, and been made into two major motion pictures―it is a moving story about war, all war, and not dated at all."― Michael Korda, author of Muse of Fire "A leaner, far more kinetic reading experience than that old Wheen translation...lively, unsentimental...a welcome invitation for a re-read.― Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review "We all know how the story ends, but Beals’s taut, approachable translation casts the wartime classic in a fresh light."― New Criterion The greatest war novel of all time rendered in a taut, muscular, and urgent new translation. An immediate sensation when it was published in 1929, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front has sold more than twenty million copies worldwide since then, making it the best-selling German novel of all time. Its impact is indisputable: it has been adapted for film, television, and other media; has influenced all subsequent works of war literature; and has been taught in high school and college classes ever since. Until now, one translation―published in 1929, and very much a product of its time―has introduced most readers in English to Remarque’s wrenching portrait of the horrors of trench warfare. Now, nearly a century later, renowned translator Kurt Beals recaptures the energy and descriptive force of the German original, rendering Remarque’s distinctly terse, telegraphic prose into a contemporary idiom, conveying for a new generation the immediacy and intensity of this classic novel. Paperback240 pagesLiveright, 2026Originally published in 19285.2 x 8 inchesISBN 9781324097792War Fiction, Classic Literature

All Quiet on the Western Front [Paperback]

Original Price: $26.99 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS "All Quiet on the Western Front" was the focus of our Literatur Café event in January 2026. To buy tickets to future events and find out more, please visit our Programs page here.By Erich Maria RemarqueTranslated by Kurt Beals An immediate sensation when it was published in 1929, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front has sold more than twenty million copies worldwide since then, making it the best-selling German novel of all time. Its impact is indisputable: it has been adapted for film, television, and other media; has influenced all subsequent works of war literature; and has been taught in high school and college classes ever since. Until now, one translation—published in 1929, and very much a product of its time—has introduced most readers in English to Remarque's wrenching portrait of the horrors of trench warfare. Now, nearly a century later, renowned translator Kurt Beals recaptures the energy and descriptive force of the German original, rendering Remarque's distinctly terse, telegraphic prose into a contemporary idiom, conveying for a new generation the immediacy and intensity of this classic novel. Hardcover240 pagesLiveright Publishing, 20255.8 x 0.9 x 8.6 inchesISBN 9781324006930Literature, Historical Fiction

All Quiet on the Western Front [Hardcover]

By Siegfried KracauerAfterword by Johannes von MoltkeTranslated by Carl Skoggard “The reissue of this novel now is valuable, beyond its considerable historical and aesthetic virtues, because it makes pertinent points about today’s world, bedeviled by war, misery, poverty, and the enticing lure of despotism as an answer to democracy’s shortcomings.” —Thomas Filbin, The Arts Fuse “Ginster’s name belongs with modern literature’s antiwar activists from the Good Soldier Švejk to Yossarian.” —Kirkus Reviews When World War I breaks out, a young architecture student in Munich does everything in his power to avoid being enlisted into the German military in this perceptive, wickedly humorous novel by a prominent twentieth-century writer, journalist, and film critic. Siegfried Kracauer’s Ginster is the great World War I novel you’ve never heard of. Here, the sheer horrors are kept offstage, as in Greek tragedy, and merely reported from time to time. The setting is the German home front. Its Chaplinesque antihero—Ginster—spends the war gumming up the German war machine as he maneuvers to stay out of its clutches and save his own skin. Which he does; however, there is a deeper struggle going on between Ginster’s dreamy self-absorption and the pitiless organization of society, war or no war. Ginster has no wish to do anything. Alas, his reveries are forever being interrupted by the demands of an other-minded world. All the scenes of Ginster are well to the rear of the military action, yet with Kracauer narrating, military language saturates all aspects of civilian life in the homeland. Ginster’s nearest and dearest are so gung-ho, he feels that he’s at the front when he visits them. War, the author seems to say, is merely ordinary life seen from the back instead of the front. As a new European war darkens our horizon, one no more expected than was World War I, Kracauer’s novel feels timelier than ever. Paperback336 pagesNYRB Classics, 2025Originally Published in 19285 x 8 inchesISBN 9781681378145German Literature

Ginster

By Charlotte Beradt Translated by Damion SearlsPreface by Dunya Mikhail "Beradt offers us not a complex hermeneutics of totalitarianism but rather a quite straight forward picture of the psychological effects of propaganda and manipulation upon a populace. . . . How does one become a totalitarian subject? What—aside from the threat of violence—are the necessary conditions? These are questions Beradt’s dreaming people daren’t ask themselves in the cold light of day, but the queries reappear under cover of night." —Zadie Smith, New York Review of Books "A strange, enthralling book. . . . The Third Reich of Dreams is a collective diary, a witness account hauled out of a nation’s shadows and into forensic light." —Mireille Juchau, The New Yorker The hidden history of a nation sleepwalking its way into evil. Charlotte Beradt began having unsettling dreams after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. She envisioned herself being shot at, tortured and scalped, surrounded by Nazis in disguise, and breathlessly fleeing across fields with storm troopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she began secretly collecting dreams from her friends and neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Disguising these “diaries of the night” in code and concealing them in the spines of books from her extensive library, she smuggled them out of the country one by one. Available again for the first time since its publication in the 1960s, this sensational book brings together this uniquely powerful dream record, offering a visceral understanding of how terror is internalized and how propaganda colonizes the imagination. After Beradt herself fled Germany for New York, she collected these dream accounts and began to trace the common symbols and themes that appeared in the collective unconscious of a traumatized nation. The fear of dictatorship was ever-present. Dreams of thought control, even the prohibition of dreaming itself, bore witness to the collapse of outer and inner worlds. Now in a haunting new translation by Damion Searls and with an incisive foreword by Dunya Mikhail, The Third Reich of Dreams provides a raw, unfiltered, and prophetic look inside the experience of living through Hitler’s terror. Hardcover152 pagesPrinceton University Press, 2025 5.5 x 8.5 inchesISBN 9780691243511History

The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation

By Franz KafkaTranslated by Edwin Muir and Willa Muir Trapped in a bureaucratic quagmire, K., a land surveyor, struggles to gain access to the mysterious, impenetrable Castle, a symbol of unassailable authority. His attempts are met with inexplicable delays, administrative hurdles, and a pervasive sense of alienation. Franz Kafka infuses his narrative with existential dread, crafting a story that is both exasperating and amusing yet deeply human. It’s a tale of the individual’s struggle against the overwhelming forces of bureaucracy, power, and the quest for identity in a world that often seems indifferent. Well into the twenty-first century, Kafka’s tale resonates with anyone who has ever felt unheard or lost in a maze of red tape. Published posthumously in 1926, The Castle was first translated into English in 1930 by Edwin and Willa Muir. Although incomplete because of Kafka’s untimely death in 1924, the novel remains a seminal work. Despite Kafka’s instruction to his close friend Max Brod to destroy all unpublished manuscripts after his death, The Castle was preserved and published. The novel stands alongside Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and The Trial as one of the twentieth century’s most significant and existentially profound absurdist literary contributions. Paperback224 pages Dover Publications, 20255 x 8 inchesISBN 9780486855394Literature

The Castle

By Alexander M. Frey Translated, with an introduction, by W.C. Bamberger Phantomata, gentlemen, human or machine, female riddle for all scholars of civilized lands. A highly honored audience will see for themselves that they do not know what she is. What might she be—the greatest miracle of hypnosis, or the mechanical masterpiece of all time? Four tales of grotesque empathy from the Weimar Republic that include all the ingredients endemic to that period: maimed beggars, female automatons, cultural prosthetics, and the spiderweb of thin lines separating everyone from opulent decadence and dire poverty. First published in 1924, Fantastic Orgy is most notable for its title story, an account of a drinking rout organized for maimed beggars in honor of a sideshow attraction: a mechanical woman doomed to early death through disintegration from entertaining the masses—a depiction of a robotic woman preceding Fritz Lang’s less sympathetic presentation in Metropolis by several years. All four stories explore the emotional and material needs of a crippled society: the sociological, economic, and moral trap of poverty, and the hypocritical righteousness of charity. Like an etching by Georg Grosz or Otto Dix translated into literary form, Alexander Frey presents the troubling, at times fantastical notion of a prosthetic humanity for damaged times. Paperback 88 pagesWakefield Press, 20254.3 x 6.9 inchesISBN 9781939663948Literature

Fantastic Orgy

By Katherine Bucknell "Christopher Isherwood Inside Out is the best biography I’ve ever read. The subject, Christopher Isherwood, was a mindful, moral man, an example for all, and a wonderfully talented writer. The author, Katherine Bucknell, explores every moment of his life—English, German, American—and links them all to the vast ongoing project of his life and work. The book is long but every page is full of surprises." —Edmund White "[Bucknell’s] big blue book breathes and glistens. Her subject, who regularly meditated as a convert with Aldous Huxley to the Hindu philosophy Vedanta, is reincarnated. . . Stone by stone, [Bucknell has] built up a gritty, gorgeous monument to a curiously indelible 20th-century figure." —Alexandra Jacobs, New York Times A stunningly intimate exploration of the writer and gay cultural icon and of his lifelong search for authenticity. The story of Christopher Isherwood’s life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood—the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man—was born the heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner of thirty years, Don Bachardy, painted his death portrait. Isherwood began his career depicting the psychological wreckage of World War I. While living in Berlin, he began to write his reputation-making fiction and (with W. H. Auden) plays inspired by the city’s nightlife, its artistic underbelly, its fevered politics. When Hitler took power, he fled with his German boyfriend, who was pursued and arrested by the Gestapo. Isherwood left Europe and found work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, where he became the disciple of a Hindu monk, Swami Prabhavananda. Together they translated the Bhagavad Gita. Isherwood shed his family ghosts and became a chief instigator of the cultural shift that made gay liberation possible. Every step of the journey served his writing; one of our greatest diarists, he recorded his experiences and transformed them in fiction and memoir. Katherine Bucknell charts the quest of the restless, penetrating, blackly comic mind through books, films, foreign lands, love affairs, and collaborations toward self-understanding and happiness. Here is Christopher Isherwood Inside Out. Paperback896 pagesPicador, 20255.4 x 1.7 x 8.2 inchesISBN 9781250390578Biography

Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out

By Ernst Toller Translated by Drew Lichtenberg Hoppla, We're Alive is a landmark drama of the Weimar Republic and one of the founding works of what would become known as a powerful portrait of a fragile democracy at war with itself, inevitably corrupted from within by the rising forces of capitalism and fascism. Toller's main character Karl Thomas, a participant in the failed Communist revolution of 1919, has spent eight years in a mental hospital. Released into the much-changed Germany of 1927, Thomas encounters each of his former comrades in a world where all of the lessons of the first World War and the revolution seem to have been forgotten. Building to a powerful and tragic climax, Toller’s play has lost none of its power to shock, provoke, and awaken readers. Paperback86 pagesBerlinica Publishing, 20195 x 8 inchesISBN 9783960260424Theater

Hoppla, We're Alive!

By Megan Brandow-Faller & Laura Morowitz Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design challenges the received narrative on the artists, exhibitions, and interpretations of Viennese Modernism. The book centers on three main erasures—the erasure of Jewish artists and critics; erasures relating to gender and sexual identification; and erasures of other marginalized figures and movements. Restoring missing elements to the story of the visual arts in early twentieth-century Vienna, authors investigate issues of gender, race, ethnic and sexual identity, and political affiliation. Both well-studied artists and organizations—such as the Secession and the Austrian Werkbund, and iconic figures such as Klimt and Hoffmann—are explored, as are lesser known figures and movements. The book’s thought-provoking chapters expand the chronological contours and canon of artists surrounding Viennese Modernism to offer original, nuanced, and rich readings of individual works, while offering a more diverse portrait of the period from 1890, through World War II and into the present. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history, design history, architectural history, and European studies. Paperback262 Pages. 10 Color & 38 BW Illustrations Routledge, 202410 x 7 inchesISBN 9781032010533 Design History, Modern Art

Erasures and Eradications in Modern Viennese Art, Architecture and Design

Edited with text by Nicholas Sawicki and Marie Rakušanová Preface by Zuzana Jürgens Text by Alexander Klee, Marek Nekula, and Miroslav Halak Journey through Kafka’s Prague and discover the art, architecture, media and performances that influenced the author’s oeuvre What did Franz Kafka see and do, whom did he meet and what did he read while roaming the streets of Prague? Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka brings the world of turn-of-the-century Czechoslovakia and its cultural milieu to life. The author’s home city was a heterogeneous and multilingual metropolis whose visual environment shaped his everyday experiences, from local painting and sculpture to architecture, monuments and popular visual media including advertisements, photography and cabaret. Kafka’s attention to the modern visual culture of his era was reflected in his writings and in his interest in drawing, a practice in which he received preliminary training and which he took up in his free time during his years as a university student. This illustrated publication immerses us in Kafka’s world; by following in his footsteps and looking through his eyes, we gain a new understanding of his thoughts, philosophies and inspirations. Hardcover224 pages | 231 color and 16 tri-tone IllustrationsKant, 20258.25 x 11.25 inchesISBN 9788074374265Exhibition Catalogue, Biography

Through the Eyes of Franz Kafka: Between Image and Language

Herausgegeben von Herbert Schnierle-Lutz »Und wo bleibt das Positive?« wurde Erich Kästner immer wieder gefragt, wenn er seine zeitkritischen Gedichte und Kolumnen veröffentlichte. »Ja, weiß der Teufel, wo das bleibt«, antwortete er.Es ist nicht einfach in dieser Welt, Literatur zu schreiben, die das Leben ohne Wenn und Aber bejaht; das viele, das menschlich und gesellschaftlich im argen liegt, beansprucht die Aufmerksamkeit der Schriftsteller, die das Leben möglichst wirklichkeitsnah und ungeschönt darstellen wollen. Und außerdem ist das Positive, wenn es ab und zu doch zum Zuge kommt, »kein guter Stoff für Dichter«, wie der Schriftsteller Robert Walser einmal feststellte. Dennoch brauchen wir zuweilen auch Nachrichten vom Glück, wollen von positiven Erfahrungen und Erlebnissen lesen. Und manchmal tun uns die Dichter, allen Bedenken zum Trotz, den Gefallen. Hymnen und Lobpreisungen, die uns Mut machen, erblicken dann das Licht der Welt. Gedichte von Franz von Assisi bis Ingeborg Bachmann, von Goethe, Eichendorff und Mörike bis Wolf Biermann und Sarah Kirsch finden sich in diesem Band versammelt. Hardcover89 pages | 4 illustrations in colorText in German Insel Verlag GmbH, 20214.6 x 0.47 x 7.3 inchesISBN 9783458192794Poetry

Es kommt ein neuer Tag, eine neue Nacht

von Hermann HesseAusgewählt und mit einem Nachwort von Siegfried Unseld Siegfried Unseld stellt in diesem Band die ihm liebsten Gedichte von Hermann Hesse vor, also diejenigen Verse, von denen er im Nachwort sagt, dasss sie ihn durch sein Leben begleitet haben. Neben den schönsten Naturgedichten und Hesses zeitloser Gedankenlyrik (Glück, Bücher, Sprache, Besinnung, Stufen), enthält seine Auswahl auch Gedichte über die der Lyrik verwandteste Gattung, die Musik (Orgelspiel, Flötenspiel). Hesses Gedichte lösen ein, was er über den Impuls sie zu schreiben sagte: »Alle Lyrik ist Spiegelund der Welt im vereinzelten Ich, Antwort des ich auf die Welt, ist Klage, Besinnung und Spiel einer ganz und gar bewußt gewordenen Vereinsamung.« Wiedergaben der Handschriften und farbig reproduzierte Aquarelle des Dichters machen den Band zu einer bibliophilen Kostbarkeit. »Jeder, der eine solche Auswahl zu treffen hat, würde jeweils andere Gedichte bevorzugen, aber weiß zugleich: Die Gedichte sind ein Hauptteil von Hesses Werk, sie sind Hardcover 75 pagesInsel, 2025Text in German 4.61 x 0.39 x 7.28 inchesISBN 9783458192121Literature

Wege nach Innen: 25 Gedichte

von Rainer Maria RilkeHerausgegeben von Rainer Stamm Seit seiner Begegnung mit Paula Becker, Clara Westhoff und den Malern der Künstlerkolonie in Worpswede setzt Rainer Maria Rilke sich immer wieder intensiv mit Malerei auseinander. Auf seinen Reisen hält er fortan seine Begegnungen mit Kunstwerken aus allen Epochen in kongenialen Bildbetrachtungen fest und berichtet in Tagebuchaufzeichnungen und Briefen von seinen Entdeckungen und Seherlebnissen. Erstmals werden in diesem Band Rilkes faszinierende Bildbeschreibungen den Werken von Rembrandt, El Greco, Goya, Böcklin, van Gogh, Picasso u. a. gegenübergestellt, die Rilke auf seinen Reisen gesehen und in seine präzise Sprache übersetzt hat. Hardcover92 pagesText in GermanInsel Verlag, 20254.8 x 0.43 x 7.24 inchesISBN 9783458645047Books in German, Rainer Maria Rilke

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