Best known for the anti-fascist novel The Seventh Cross and the existential thriller Transit, Anna Seghers was also a gifted writer of short fiction. The stories she wrote throughout her life reflect her political activism as well as her deep engagement with myth; they are also some of her most formally experimental work. This selection of Seghers’s best stories, written between 1925 and 1965,...

A gritty, realist depiction of Ukraine and the post Soviet world, this book offers an affecting yet honest look into the life of someone suffering from PTSD. It is a story of growing up without much hope for a better future, and yet intense moments of connection and kindness persist. Just when things begin to seem insurmountably dark, a friendship begins, a kind word is said, or a hand reaches...

The quest for self-discovery never ends, especially for Harry Haller-better known as the Steppenwolf. After a life spent in self-imposed isolation, Harry meets the mysterious Hermine and becomes captivated by her intoxicating power. Through their nighttime adventures, the Steppenwolf experiences the decadent underbelly of the bourgeois society he always despised. Harry becomes a man...

A towering figure in the pantheon of twentieth-century literature, Thomas Mann has often been perceived as a dry and forbidding writer-'the starched collar,' as Bertolt Brecht once called him. But in fact, his fiction is lively, humane, sometimes hilarious. In these fresh renderings of his best short work, award-winning translator Damion Searls casts new light on this underappreciated aspect of...

Twisting the art of the fairytale into something entirely her own, Alla Gorbunova’s (Th)ings and (Th)oughts is a spellbinding collection of thematically-linked short prose. A teacher contemplates leaving her husband after learning that he doesn’t have a soul; a functionary realizes that the only way to survive in contemporary Russia is to go insane; cars fall inexplicably from the sky;...

One of the great prose stylists of his generation, André Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what time means to artists who cannot grasp life in the present. Irrealis moods are not about the present or the past or the future; they are about what might have been but never was but could in theory still happen. From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances...

A group of college friends find themselves marooned at a luxurious hotel on the Amalfi Coast in Italy. While their boat is being repaired, they can't help but observe the daily routine of a fellow hotel guest - a mysterious, white-bearded stranger who sits on the veranda each night and smokes one cigarette, sometimes two.

This book contains seven stories about family. On its pages, you will meet a teenage girl in a yellow cap. She will tell you about street sweepers, golden leaf-fish, and how her father decided to remarry. Her story will be picked up by a boy living with his mother and jealous of her ‘side job.’ Then a character will enter, whose heart is stirred by a past love. Love for a girl who already has...

Dorothee Elmigers bildgewaltiger Roman - eine mitreißende Erfahrung. Wer diesen Text betritt, fällt in den Abgrund unserer Welt und blickt mit aufgerissenen Augen in die Finsternis. Ausgezeichnet mit dem Deutschen Buchpreis, dem Schweizer Buchpreis und dem Bayerischen Buchpreis 2025. Mit blinkenden Warnlichtern fährt die Erzählerin, eine namenlose Schriftstellerin, an den Straßenrand, als ein...

Eines ist klar: »Klausen ist ein Tatort.« Was aber wirklich in diesem Südtiroler Ferienidyll für vor allem deutsche Touristen passiert ist, darüber gehen die Meinungen leidenschaftlich auseinander. Man erzählt von einem Überfall, gar einem gezielten Schuß aus dem Hinterhalt. Wer ist das Opfer, wer der Täter? Darüber gibt es zunächst nur abenteuerliche Spekulationen. Erste Verdächtigungen gehen...

Wie findet sich ein Vampir heute in einer Stadt wie Amsterdam zurecht? Er versucht, sich legal, sozusagen redlich zu ernähren: als Saugtherapeut. Über seine Kundschaft, mit Vorliebe Arztfrauen, weiß er Geschichten. Aber Mona, seine einzige nächtliche Zuhörerin, will sich mit erzählten Figuren nicht zufriedengeben und hat Gründe, diesen Erzähler namens Samstag auf seine Stichhaltigkeit hin zu...

The book, nominated for the Booker Prize, literally exploded onto the domestic book market and acquired not just cult status, but legendary status! A novella in which the theme of growing up is turned upside down and takes on features of surreal humor! A book that hilariously and subtly parodies the very idea of ??a happy childhood. The sensitive and intelligent Sanaev understood everything...