The Polish poet Ryszard Krynicki, born in a Nazi labor camp in Austria in 1943, became one of the most prominent poets of the New Wave generation of 1968, his poetry offering what Adam Michnik has called ‘a strange and beautiful marriage of Joseph Conrad's heroic ethics with a great metaphysical perspective.’ Krynicki is the author of a body of work marked at once by the solitude of a poète...

Unlike the more earnest English Romantic poets, followers of the Romantic movement in Germany valued wit and humor along with beauty. Admiration for nature is also prominent in their poetry, and in particular the dramatic forests which still cover large areas of Germany. Love and death crop up repeatedly as themes in such famous works as Goethe’s ‘Elf King’ and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde....

Samson Kolechko and his colleague have been dispatched to investigate the illegal sale of meat. How selling cuts of one’s own livestock qualifies as a crime eludes the young investigator, but an order is an order, and, at the insistence of the secret police officer assigned to ‘reinforce’ the Lybid police station, Samson vows to do his very best. But just as Samson is beginning to dig into the...

The protagonists of Andris Kurprišs’s debut collection are at times melancholy and worrisome, and world-angry or absurdist at others. Kuprišs plays with tension, a building up to climaxes reminiscent of Henry James—but with endings that leave a lingering sense of having missed some important detail, some sinister clue that will reveal all meaning. Deceptively simple, nostalgic, and resigned,...

In 1961, overnight a concrete border went up, dividing the city of Berlin into two parts - East and West. The story of the Berlin Wall holds up a mirror to post-WWII politics and the Cold War Era when the United States and the USSR were enemies, always on the verge of war. The wall meant that no one from Communist East Berlin could travel to West Berlin, a free, democratic area. Of course that...

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...

Lazar Lindt, a brilliant scientist and a big child, ‘a lawless comet in a circle of calculating luminaries’, is the center of the infernal personal stories of three extraordinary women. The childless Marusya, the wife of his older friend, will fall in love with a funny young man who appeared on the threshold of her house in 1918, not at all filial love, but it will remain his secret. After the...

With care for your eyes! Large-font edition for easy reading. The Count of Monte Cristo, one of the most popular novels by Alexandre Dumas, is a stunning success with readers. The author took its plot from the archives of the Parisian police. The real life of the shoemaker François Picot, who became the prototype of Edmond Dantes, was transformed under the pen of a real artist into a gripping...

Nicht schon wieder! Adelheid muss eingreifen, nämlich immer dann, wenn ihr bester Freund Benni »Blödsinn hoch zwei« anstellt. Nach dem Motto »Rache ist (Blut-)Wurst« hat er es diesmal auf die zickige Sarah-Michelle abgesehen - und gerät prompt in den dicksten Schlamassel. Aber nicht nur Benni braucht dringend Adelheids Beistand, auch ihren Schwestern muss Adelheid aus der Klemme helfen. Dabei...

Adelheids bester Freund Benni hat mal wieder nichts als Blödsinn im Kopf. (Blödsinn hoch zwei, wie Adelheids große Schwester immer sagt.) Und Adelheid hat alle Hände voll zu tun, das Schlimmste zu verhüten. Doch das geht oft gründlich schief. Wie zum Beispiel bei Bennis Versuch, seinen Opa mit Adelheids Oma zu verheiraten. Oder als Benni es sich in den Kopf gesetzt hat, Klassensprecher zu...

Wo lebten und leben echte Indianer? Wie heißen die unterschiedlichen Stämme? Wohnen alle Indianer in Zelten? In welchem Alter bekamen Indianerkinder ihr erstes eigenes Pferd? Wann gingen sie zum ersten Mal auf Bisonjagd? Um diese und weitere spannende Fragen beantworten zu können, besuchen der kleine Drache Kokosnuss, der Fressdrache Oskar und das Stachelschein Matilda noch einmal das...