From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly...

The novel ‘Shoes of the Mother of God’ by the prominent Ukrainian writer Maria Mathios tells about one of the most painful tragedies of the 20th century in the territory that historian Timothy Snyder calls the ‘bloodlands’. This is a new edition of the work with new episodes.

Stanislavov in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An ordinary city on the border of ‘happy Austria’, in which they live, suffer, fall in love, admire science and charlatan performances of world-famous illusionists, have fun at balls and carnivals, go for walks and hide secrets in carved chests of drawers. And against the background of the era, which for posterity will become more and more...

The family saga in the short stories ‘Almost never the other way around’ by the prominent Ukrainian writer Maria Mathios is not inferior to her famous ‘Sweet Darusa’ in terms of skill of writing and depth of presentation. ‘It is not time that counts, but a person in the circumstances of time’ - the writer reveals this thesis through the dramatic history of several Hutsul families during the...

Zuleikha is the model of a dutiful wife. Biddible and meek, she has resigned herself to brutal treatment at the hands of her cruel husband and the carping of her despotic mother-in-law. While Russia reels in the aftermath of its recent revolution, life in her small Tatar village is relatively untouched. Or so it seems to Zuleikha, until the day her husband is executed by communist soldiers....

In the mid-eighteenth century, as new ideas—and a new unrest—begin to sweep the Continent, a young Jew of mysterious origins arrives in a village in Poland. Before long, he has changed not only his name but his persona; visited by what seem to be ecstatic experiences, Jacob Frank casts a charismatic spell that attracts an increasingly fervent following. In the decade to come, Frank will...

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.

Together with poets and thinkers we walk through the streets of Vienna: with Stefan Zweig we visit the Vienna Concert Hall, Ingeborg Bachmann shows us the Ungargassenland and we meet Friedrich Torberg for a piece of Sachertorte. And Klaus Mann, Robert Seethaler and Arthur Schnitzler also have a lot to say.

One of the most intense yet absorbing studies ever done of a normal man's descent into drunkenness.

It presents a richly detailed portrait of life in Berlin under the Nazis and tells the sweeping saga of one working-class couple who decides to take a stand when their only son is killed at the front. With nothing but their grief and each other against the awesome power of the Reich, they launch a simple, clandestine resistance campaign that soon has an enraged Gestapo on their trail, and a...