The four long narratives in The Emigrants appear at first to be the straightforward biographies of four Germans in exile. Sebald reconstructs the lives of a painter, a doctor, an elementary-school teacher, and Great Uncle Ambrose. Following (literally) in their footsteps, the narrator retraces routes of exile which lead from Lithuania to London, from Munich to Manchester, from the South German...

New York, 1911. Gustav Mahler’s recent tenure conducting the New York Philharmonic has been an extraordinary success and a time of feverish artistic defiance. He is arguably the most celebrated musician alive. In America, however, his compositions have turned more inward-looking, for he knows, or suspects, that death is near.

The Fifth Year follows a five-year-old girl, Marili, through each season of a single year on her grandparents’ farm in the mountains of Austria. Her grand-mother is a quiet, melancholic woman; her grandfather, with his calm, cheerful disposition, radiates warmth. Marili’s parents have presumably died in the war, and she is left to discover-with curiosity, wonder, and fear-the beauty and...

Shipwrecks and border pushbacks; epidemics and industrial ruins; a family separated by economic necessity; a brother lost to crime; love and fear and memories of happier times in Berlin—yet through it all runs a silver thread of hope spun by a far-off friend. Every Time We Say Goodbye is an extended soliloquy of self-examination, upheaval, loss, hope, disillusionment, ambition, and failure, and...

The United States was shaped by resistance—but not in the way we’ve been taught. The Revolution did not secure liberty; it opened the door to either liberty or oppression, where only white men enjoyed all of the benefits and protections of citizenship. In A Resistance History of the United States, public historian Tad Stoermer shows how from the very beginning, that tension—between the ideals...

With the stroke of a pen at the Potsdam Conference following the Allied victory in 1945, Breslau, the largest German city east of Berlin, became the Polish city of Wroclaw. Its more than six hundred thousand inhabitants-almost all of them ethnic Germans-were expelled and replaced by Polish settlers from all parts of prewar Poland. Uprooted examines the long-term psychological and cultural...

Rare materials on Belarus are a potential treasure trove for the English language reader. A blank spot on the map for many, Belarus is an undiscovered mystery in the heart of Europe - undiscovered, because little has been published on the country's history and current affairs, and the origin of the ethnic group that calls itself 'Belarusians'. Author Lubov Bazan attempts to uplift the veil of...