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...

Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later a camp in Rouen, the nameless twenty-seven-year-old German narrator of Seghers’s multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he is asked to deliver a letter to a man named Weidel in Paris and discovers Weidel has committed suicide, leaving behind a suitcase containing letters and...

Böll’s well-known opposition to fascism and war informs this moving story of a single day in the life of traumatized soldier Robert Faehmel, scion of a family of successful Cologne architects, as he struggles to return to ordinary life after the Second World War. An encounter with a war-time nemesis, now a power in the reconstruction of Germany, forces him to confront private memories and the...

Wie alle Hauptwerke Hermann Hesses hat auch der Demian, den der damals 40jährige Autor mitten im Ersten Weltkrieg schrieb, eine ebenso ungewöhnliche wie spannende Entstehungs- und Wirkungsgeschichte. Daß dieses im Herbst 1917 vollendete Buch erst im Juni 1919, ein halbes Jahr nach Kriegsende, veröffentlicht wurde, lag an der Unbekanntheit des Verfassers. Denn Hesse hatte das Manuskript dem...

»Harry Haller ist in das kulturlose und unmenschliche Inferno unserer prunkenden und lärmenden Gegenwart vorgedrungen und steht mit seinem Begriff von Menschenwert… einsam außerhalb der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Seine Sehnsucht kennt eine unerreichbare Wirklichkeit: seine Verzweiflung treibt ihn zuweilen in die erreichbare andere zurück. Lust und Enttäuschung ihres Daseins führen in seinem...

What will be the fate of the paper book in the world of smart fleas and holograms, viviparous fur and goldfish, after the New Middle Ages and the Second Islamic Revolution? In the novel 'Manaraga' Vladimir Sorokin sets an unexpected vector for thinking about the relationship of humanity with the printed word. The unusual profession of the protagonist - an underground worker, a romantic, a...

Here cattlemen steal geese, drink port on the roof of the Kazan Cathedral, Soviet citizens hunt for shortages and mock the leaders; here the romantic builders of the Great Empire love, believe and cheat, and the golden Brezhnev era becomes clearer in the haze like a beautiful and nostalgic picaresque novel.

From the flamboyant and unpredictable Maryska, who scandalises the town when she cuts short her golden tresses, to the eccentric Uncle Pepin, who always has to have a ready supply of furniture to smash when he's angry, Bohumil Hrabal creates a range of enchanting and memorable characters - confirming his status as one of Europe's greatest writers.

Heinrich Düring, Gemeindebeamter in Fallingbostel, führt ein Doppelleben: Er verachtet das NS-Regime und den Alltag des deutschen Kleinbürgertums, nach außen aber gibt er sich angepasst. Seinen Ausgleich findet er in der Natur, durchstreift unermüdlich die geliebte Heidelandschaft, liest Wieland und Tieck. Im Wald entdeckt er eine Hütte und bezieht sie als Versteck für sich und seine...

The three novellas of Farewell, Aylis take place over decades of transition in a country that rather resembles modern-day Azerbaijan.

Martinsen demonstrates how Dostoevsky first plunges the reader into Raskolnikov’s fevered brain, creating sympathy for him, and she explains why most readers root for him to get away from the scene of the crime. Dostoevsky subsequently provides outsider perspectives on Raskolnikov’s thinking, effecting a conversion in reader sympathy. By examining the multiple justifications for murder...

Oliver is eleven years old, and he chose his own name after a favorite Dickens character. He loves playing Snake on his phone and eating food ‘like they do in America’; he dreams of defeating the bully Tsapa, being cured of HIV, and finding a real family. But just as his prospective mom and dad arrive from Salt Lake City, TV reports begin predicting the imminent end of the world. Fiction writer...