The volume contains Kafka's most important short prose texts from the period up to 1914: Conversation with the Prayer, Conversation with the Drunk, Big Noise, the Collection Contemplation and the great stories The Judgment and In the Penal Colony.

Wolfgang Fruehwald's sensational new edition of Ernst Toller's autobiography, which was awarded a prize by the magazine at that time and was published in hardcover by Reclam in 2011, opens up this important text with a detailed commentary that gives the reader the historical background of the pre-war period, the First World War and the Munich Soviet Republic as well as all appearing persons...

A young couple and three days of happiness - the little prose idyll about the lovers Claire and Wölfchen, who try to escape the everyday life of Berlin's big city, made Kurt Tucholsky famous overnight. His first and lightest book. A wonderful summer read, not only for lovers.

'What comes after?' If life after death were to be what Kurt Tucholsky envisioned, then it wouldn't be bad at all: sitting on a cloud with a friend and contemplating life. In the 1920s he devoted himself to the hereafter, God, human errors and relationships in 20 profound and amusing stories that appeared as a column in the Weltbuehne. With an afterword by Ute Maack. Illustrated by Hannah Kolling.

Ever since it was first published in 1984, this anthology of German poems has been one of the classics in Reclam Verlag's programme. It offers a deliberately short selection of excellent and representative poems by over 100 most important poets in the German language from a period of more than twelve centuries. It has been updated and expanded again and again, now with poems by Elke Erb, Ulrich...

In addition to candles, baubles and tinsel, they are essential tools for every successful Christmas celebration: poems by timeless classics (to be read under the tree!) and many contemporaries (it's nice that there's always good news). Happy holidays are guaranteed! Nebst Kerzen, Kugeln und Lametta gehören sie zum unverzichtbaren Rüstzeug für jedes gelungene Weihnachtsfest: Gedichte von...

A lyrical cross-section through the diversity of romanticism. The epoch was a heyday of poetry art. She turned to new themes, the fairytale, the night, longing, she developed new motifs such as forest solitude, moonlight and Loreley and aimed at the dissolution of the individual's boundaries in nature or in the universe. The selection ranges from the beginnings in Jena to late Romanticism, from...

He made his debut as child prodigy Loris, and very early on, at about twenty years of age, Hofmannsthal found his style in poetry. The famous poems that form the core of his ultimately small lyrical oeuvre, which is presented here in a selected edition, were composed in the mid-1890s.

In the course of his life Goethe wrote more than three thousand poems, apparently easy to understand, but also those of the highest linguistic and metaphorical complexity, poems in song-like strophic forms, in strict ancient meters or rhymeless poetry. With this lyrical work, which is exceptional in scope and importance, he actually created the German-language poem of the modern age.

Set in a boarding school in a remote area of the Habsburg Empire at the turn of the last century, The Confusions of Young Torless is an intense study of an adolescent's psychological development as he struggles to come to terms with his conflicting emotions. Through his relationship with two other boys Torless is led into sadistic and sexual encounters with a third pupil which both repel and...

His short story collection Drei Frauen (Three Women) -- consisting of Grigia, The Portuguese Lady, and Tonka -- was published in 1924. Musil in these tales explores Europe on the verge between civilization and brutality, the modern and pre-modern, nationalism and humanism, and between ‘precision and soul,’ to use Musil's own phrase. In encounters with the three women of the title, each male...

Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological.