The novel MOTHER, one of Gorky’s most popular works, was based on the mass demonstration of 1902 in the city of Sormovo. Hence, an exciting plot based on real events, with a sharp political struggle, secret gatherings, searches, arrests, and the selfless heroism of the protagonist-revolutionary Pavel Vlasov. However, the central image in the novel is Pelageya Nilovna Vlasova, the mother of the...

'Wild Animal Tales' is a collection of fairy tales, where you can recognize each animal as a friend, neighbor, and sometimes yourself. In fantastic situations that develop around the characters of fairy tales, there is much more real, real life than it might seem at first glance. Wit, brilliant imagination, the ability to create stunning linguistic games - all these talents of Lyudmila...

Als Mira sich auf den Weg nach Südkärnten macht, steht ihr eine schwierige Aufgabe bevor: Sie muss ihre betagte Mutter auf den Auszug aus dem Haus vorbereiten, in dem sie vor Jahrzehnten mit den damals noch kleinen Kindern Obdach gefunden hat. Im Lauf der folgenden Wochen verdichten sich Miras eigene Erinnerungen an das Dorf und an eine als traumatisch erlebte Kindheit, geprägt von der rigiden...

Ein Mädcheninternat im Appenzell der sechziger Jahre. Gehorsam und Disziplin prägen die Ordnung des Hauses. Die heitere Landschaft vor den Fenstern treibt die vierzehnjährige Ich-Erzählerin zu stundenlangen einsamen Spaziergängen. Eines Tages erscheint eine Neue während des Mittagessens: Frédérique, schön, streng, verächtlich und voller Überdruss. Frédérique ist anders, etwas Leises und...

Diese Ausgabe der »Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek - Arbeitstexte für Schule und Studium« bietet nicht nur eine repräsentative Auswahl der Gedichte Paul Celans, sondern im Anhang auch die für das Verständnis des Werks höchst aufschlussreiche Büchner-Preisrede »Der Meridian«. Ergänzt wird die Edition von einem Kommentar, der alle für das Verständnis der Gedichte erforderlichen Informationen enthält:...

»Was diese Gedichte an Irritationen, an Desorientierung auch ausdrücken mögen, sie zeigen alle die Unbeirrbarkeit an der Fähigkeit dieses Ausdrückenkönnens. Sie zeigen eine Meisterschaft in der Beherrschung der Mittel, die Celan ausgebildet hat, wie kaum ein Band von ihm vorher.« Helmut Heißenbüttel

A searing portrayal of Vienna’s bourgeoisie, it begins with the arrival of an unnamed writer at an ‘artistic dinner’ hosted by a composer and his society wife—a couple he once admired and has come to loathe. The guest of honor, a distinguished actor from the Burgtheater, is late. As the other guests wait impatiently, they are seen through the critical eye of the writer, who narrates a silent...

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...

Srdan Srdic's collection of short stories, Combustions, establishes this author's position as one of the best prose writers in Serbia and across the region. This book consists of nine stories in which the author brings the reader face to face with the seamy side of everyday life, where, somewhere in the province, hopelessness and despair of the endless Balkan transition meet one another in the...

An avid reader of English-language poets such as William Carlos Williams and Stanley Kunitz, Ilchenko is one of the best Ukrainian poets writing in free verse today. His poetry is associative, flitting, and fragmentary. At times he does not form complete sentences in his poems and links words together into phrases before shifting into another thought or idea. The language of his poetry has a...

To my mind Maria Matios’ Sweet Darusya is the best contemporary Ukrainian novel written since Ukrainian Independence in 1991. It reveals a family saga that is much more dynamic than classical sagas and at the same time is much more touching and engaging. It is an emotional history of Ukraine with a very well researched and vivid historical background that gives the reader the opportunity to...

Ginster is a war novel about not going to war; about how war, far from the front, comes to warp every aspect of outer and inner life and to infect the workings of language itself. The subject is World War I, but this novel by the brilliant twentieth-century sociologist, journalist, and film critic Siegfried Kracauer, first published in 1928, has as much to say about what it means to live under...