Sehnsucht und Begehren, Schönheit und Tod. Wo sonst als im alten Venedig kann man sich so verlieben und verzehren wie der Schriftsteller Gustav Aschenbach in Thomas Manns berühmter Novelle. Vom »Einbruch der Leidenschaft« erzählt Thomas Mann, von der verbotenen Liebe des Schriftstellers zu dem schönen Jungen Tadzio. Zugleich aber erzählt er auch vom Ausbruch einer Pandemie, der Cholera, an der...

»Fabian« ist Erich Kästners Meisterwerk. Doch das Buch wurde vor seinem Erscheinen 1931 verändert und gekürzt, denn der junge Kästner hatte in seinem ersten Roman alle Register gezogen. Das machte das Manuskript für den Verlag zu einem Sprengsatz, den das Lektorat mit spitzen Fingern entschärfte. Das Buch erschien schließlich entgegen Kästners ursprünglicher Intention unter dem Titel »Fabian«....

Der zeitlose Klassiker über winterliche Irrungen und Wirrungen jetzt in einem Band mit der wiederentdeckten Kästner-Erzählung Inferno im Hotel. Dieses Buch versammelt erstmals Erich Kästners Welterfolg »Drei Männer im Schnee« und die Erzählung »Inferno im Hotel«, die 1927 nur in einer Zeitung erschien und Kästner später als Vorlage für den Roman diente. Dazu ein Beitrag der Kästner-Expertin...

The book includes two of the most famous novels by American writer Mark Twain 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. Boys and girls have been reading stories about the adventures of two desperate and naughty boys for almost two centuries. Tom and Huck are two good friends. True, they are forbidden to make friends, because Huck is a tramp, well-bred children...

With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps–a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and...

This book introduces readers to the legacy of the outstanding Russian writer Varlam Shalamov. The works included in the collection give a complete picture of the various stages of his work. A series of 'Kolyma Tales' is published here, as well as stories from the collections 'Left Bank', 'A Spade Artist', 'Essays on the Underworld,' 'Resurrection of Larch,' and 'Glove, or KR-2.'

The novel ‘The Gambler’ has strong autobiographical motives, because Dostoevsky himself was a gambler. The story of the creation of this book is very interesting: having lost his last penny in Wiesbaden, the writer, desperately in need of money, signed a contract with a publishing house, according to which he had to write a novel... in 26 days. These completely implausible terms forced...

Michael Hofmann's startlingly visceral and immediate translation revives Kafka's great comedy, and captures a new Kafka, free from Prague and loose in the new world, a Kafka shot through with light in this highly charged and enormously nuanced translation. Kafka began the first of his three novels in 1911, but like the others, Amerika remained unfinished, and perhaps, as Klaus Mann suggested,...

Animals, strange beasts, bureaucrats, businessmen, and nightmares populate this collection of stories by Franz Kafka. These matchless short works, all unpublished during Kafka’s lifetime, range from the gleeful dialogue between a cat and a mouse in ‘Little Fable’ to the absurd humor of ‘Investigations of a Dog,’ from the elaborate waking nightmare of ‘Building the Great Wall of China’ to the...

Vladimir Nabokov began working on his first novel, tentatively titled Happiness, in 1924 in Berlin. By the end of the year, the first two chapters of the book were ready, but the writer soon decided to destroy the manuscript. Only a small excerpt survived, which Nabokov reworked into a short story and published in January 1925 under the title Letter to Russia. He decided to return to the...

As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen--an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life. His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster--but at a cost: in Luzhin' s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants the world of reality. His own...