A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before....

A dazzling debut novel about a young woman's vexed coming of age in a traditional Azerbaijani community in Russia, grappling under the weight of Muslim patriarchal norms and a debilitating neurological condition. The mysterious affliction leaves her unable to control her muscles, plagued by pain and speech disorders, defying diagnosis. Addressing each body part with the scrupulousness of a...

Siggi Jepsen, incarcerated as a juvenile delinquent, is one day assigned to write a routine German lesson on the ‘The Joys of Duty.’ Overfamiliar with these ‘joys,’ Siggi sets down his life since 1943, a decade earlier, when as a boy he watched his father, constable of the northernmost police station in Germany, doggedly carry out orders from Berlin to stop a well-known Expressionist, their...

In Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Ingeborg Bachmann invites the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men: viewed through the tilting prism of obsession, she travels further into her own madness, anxiety, and genius. Malina explores love, 'deathstyles,' the roots of fascism, and passion.

Written when Ingeborg Bachmann was only eighteen, The Honditsch Cross—her second-longest completed work of prose after Malina—is a historical novella set during the final days of the Napoleonic occupation of Austria in 1813.

In this brief interlude, severed from reality, it seems as if M may finally escape from herself, from her past, from her nationality. Written in rich and hypnotic prose, The Disappearing Act oscillates between reality and dream, between an oppressive present and a lost past, between life and literature.

With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and...

The young artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets was in her hometown of Kyiv when Putin’s ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine began on the morning of February 24, 2022. With the shelling of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, and Kherson, the war with Russia had clearly, irreversibly begun: ‘I thought, this has been allowed to happen, it is a crime against everything human, against a great common...

A monumental new translation—the first in more than twenty years—of Russia’s greatest family drama, rendered with all the passion, humor, and soul of the original.

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...

From the tender and intimate stories of people caring for their loved ones as they deteriorate from radiation sickness to the moving stories of the people in the surrounding cities told suddenly to abandon their homes, this definitive translation of Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s masterpiece closely examines the human realities of the Chernobyl disaster and the half-century we have lived...