Books in the The German List series

Over ten rainy nights, Thomas, an ex-barge-man who used to be skipper of his own boat, walks the muddy fields of the land-locked German interior and remembers the events that lost him his home, his boat, and his livelihood. In this novel, Thomas remembers childhood, his first love, and the warning of his grandfather: Beware the dark company.

Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters has been called his "most enjoyable novel" by the New York Review of Books. It's a wild satire that takes place almost entirely in front of Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man, on display in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, as two typically Viennese pedants (serving as alter egos for Bernhard himself) irreverently, even contemptuously take down high culture, society, state-supported artists, Heidegger, and much more. It's a book built on thought and conversation rather than action or visuals. Yet somehow celebrated Austrian cartoonist Nicholas Mahler has brought it to life in graphic form--and it's brilliant. This volume presents Mahler's typically minimalist cartoons alongside new translations of selected passages from the novel. The result is a version of Old Masters that is strikingly new, yet still true to Bernhard's bleak vision, and to the novel's outrageous proposition that the perfect work of art is truly unbearable to even think about--let alone behold.

A series of sketches, depicting the last months of World War II and the first year of the subsequent British occupation of Austria.

Drawn from the author's experiences as a political prisoner and as a refugee, this novel features Rasul Hamid who describes the eight different ways he fled his home in Iraq and the eight different ways he has failed to find a way home. It is a literary looking glass between two cultures, between two places, and between East and West.

Opens with a young couple enjoying a moment of carefree intimacy. Then the young woman, turning slightly more serious, asks her lover that fateful question, one that sounds so innocent but carries toxic seeds of jealousy: What was your life like before you met me?

With subversive energy and masterful brevity, Mr Zed undermines arrogance, megalomania, and false authority. A determined speaker who doesn't care for ambitions, he forces topics that others would rather keep to themselves. This work collects the considerations and provocations of this squat park-bench philosopher.

"This publication was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, India"--page facing title page.

When Keith Stapperpfenning and his family give their grandfather the trip of a lifetime - an all-expenses-paid holiday to any destination in the world - the eccentric old man arbitrarily chooses China, and he asks Keith to accompany him. But when his grandfather dies unexpectedly, Keith is left to continue the farce alone.

Set in a village somewhere on the endless Hungarian plain, this title features characters who tell stories - comic, tragic, or both - of life in rural Hungary. It includes tales of onion kings and melon pickers, of scrapyards and sugar beet factories, that paint a vivid and human picture of their world.

Almost twenty years after the fall of the wall, the Kreuzberg district of Berlin has become unbearably trendy and deeply unappealing to Alina and Wolf. They move to Muggelsee, at the city's bucolic border. But there, Wolf finds himself increasingly strained by the triviality of his daily routine with Alina.

The protagonist has just turned thirty and is engaged to be married and about to start work as a teacher. Frightened by the idea of settling down, he journeys to the Alps in a do-or-die effort to climb the unclimbed North Ridge, and by doing so prove he is not ordinary.

Features the essays that offer informed insight into day-to-day practices in the rights and permissions departments of publishing houses. This title addresses key underlying and practical issues, such as the protection of intellectual property, the length of copyright, contract duration, and the appropriate royalty rates for authors.

Georg Trakl is an Austrian-German expressionist. This translation marks the hundredth anniversary of Trakl's death during the first months of World War I. It introduces readers to the powerful verses of this wartime poet.

A moving work of fiction from one of the most important writers of postwar Austrian and German literature. Born in 1921 to a Jewish mother, Ilse Aichinger (1921-2016) survived World War II in Vienna, while her twin sister Helga escaped with one of the last Kindertransporte to England in 1938. Many of their relatives were deported and murdered. Those losses make themselves felt throughout Aichinger's writing, which since her first and only novel, The Greater Hope, in 1948, has highlighted displacement, estrangement, and a sharp skepticism toward language. By 1976, when she published Bad Words in German, her writing had become powerfully poetic, dense, and experimental. This volume presents the whole of the original Bad Words in English for the first time, along with a selection of Aichinger's other short stories of the period; together, they demonstrate her courageous effort to create and deploy a language unmarred by misleading certainties, preconceived rules, or implicit ideologies.

Two men talk in Tokyo. One, a Belgian, is a diplomat. The other, Dutch, is a photographer. What, they wonder, is the real face of Japan? How can they get beyond the European idea of the nation and its people--with its exoticism--and see Japan as it truly is? The Belgian has an idea: he helps the photographer find a model to shoot in front of Mount Fuji as the "typical Japanese." The plan works better than either had imagined--in fact, it works too well: the photographer falls in love, neglects his friend and his career, and, feeling out of place and disillusioned in Holland, returns to Japan as often as possible over the next five years. A reunion is planned: the three will meet again at Mount Fuji. Time, it seems, has stood still . . . except the woman has a secret, and plans of her own. This moving novel of obsession and difference is the latest masterwork from one of the greatest European writers working today, redolent with the power of desire and alive to the limits of our understanding of others.

One of Germany's best-known exponents of North Indian classical music, specifically dhrupad singing, Perer Pannke has traveled from his home in Germany to Varanasi, Delhi, Darbhanga, and the forests of Vrindaban to study classical Indian singing in the most famous gharanas - musical houses - of India. This title tells the story of a life in music.

IN

A unique and modern approach to money, wealth, greed, and financial ignorance presented via a story of a family in the Munich suburbs. The Federmanns live a pleasant but painfully normal life in the Munich suburbs. All that the three children really know about money is that there‿s never enough of it in their family.   Every so often, their impish Great-Aunt Fé descends on the city. After repeated cycles of boom and bust, profligacy and poverty, the grand old lady has become enormously wealthy and lives alone in a villa on the shore of Lake Geneva. But what does Great-Aunt Fé want from the Federmanns, her only surviving relatives? This time, she invites the children to tea at her luxury hotel where she spoils, flummoxes, and inspires them. Dismayed at their ignorance of the financial ways of the world, she gives them a crash course in economics that piques their curiosity, unsettles their parents, and throws open a whole new world. The young Federmanns are for once taken seriously and together they try to answer burning questions: Where does money come from? Why are millionaires and billionaires never satisfied? And why are those with the most always showered with more?   In this rich volume, the renowned poet, translator, and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger turns his gimlet eye on the mechanisms and machinations of banks and politicians‿the human greed, envy, and fear that fuels the global economy. A modern, but moral-less fable, Money, Money, Money! is shot through with Enzensberger‿s trademark erudition, wit, and humanist desire to cut through jargon and forearm his readers against obscurantism. Â

Reinhard Jirgl's strikingly individual novel The Fire Above, the Mountain Below demonstrates that he is not only unorthodox in his approach to language, but also difficult to pin down in terms of any genre. Weaving together elements of crime story, Cold War espionage, family tragedy, and a dystopian future, he creates a tapestry of fragile humanity and menacing inhumanity. The investigation of a series of gruesome killings takes a detective inspector into explorations of a secret intelligence programme in former East Germany and the role of a family with a tragic history. The more is uncovered, the more disorienting it becomes, and the reader is drawn into a complex web of discovery and suppression.

A book about bitter fates‿both already known and yet to unfold‿and the many kinds of organized machinery built to destroy people. Alexander Kluge‿s work has long grappled with the Third Reich and its aftermath, and the extermination of the Jews forms its gravitational center. Kluge is forever reminding us to keep our present catastrophes in perspective‿“calibratedâ€?‿against this historical monstrosity. Kluge‿s newest work is a book about bitter fates, both already known and yet to unfold. Above all, it is about the many kinds of organized machinery built to destroy people. These forty-eight stories of justice and injustice are dedicated to the memory of Fritz Bauer, a determined fighter for justice and district attorney of Hesse during the Auschwitz Trials. “The moment they come into existence, monstrous crimes have a unique ability,â€? Bauer once said, “to ensure their own repetition.â€? Kluge takes heed, and in these pages reminds us of the importance of keeping our powers of observation and memory razor sharp. Â

In a world full of devils, the giant ape Kong defends what he loves the most. But who and what is this undomesticated animal? Might it reside within us? As we tread confidently, is this where the earth opens up beneath us?   In Kong‿s Finest Hour, Alexander Kluge explores anew the accessible spaces where Kong dwells within us and in our million-year-old past. The more than two hundred stories contained in this volume form a chronicle of connections that together survey these spaces using diverse perspectives. These include stories about the folds of Kong‿s nose, the voice of the author‿s mother, the poet Heinrich von Kleist and Jack the Ripper, the indestructability of the political, and the supercontinent Pangaea that once unified the earth. Dissolving theory into storytelling has been Kluge‿s lifelong pursuit, and this magnificent collection tells stories of people as well of things.   First in a series of Kluge‿s Chronicles forthcoming from Seagull Books, Kong‿s Finest Hour will delight those familiar with his writing as well as introduce readers to the brilliance of one of Germany‿s greatest living writers. Â

German author Friedrich Ani combines deep sorrow, human darkness, and breath-taking tension in his latest crime novel. Happiness is extinguished completely one cold November night when eleven-year-old Lennard Grabbe fails to return home. Thirty-four days later, he is found to have been murdered, and former inspector Jakob Franck, the protagonist of Friedrich Ani‿s previous novel The Nameless Day, is entrusted with delivering the most horrible news any parent could ever dream of, setting off a chain reaction of grief among family and friends.   As the special task force is unable to make any progress in the case and the family is unable to deal with the loss, Franck‿driven by the need to bring them clarity but also by the painful memories of all the unsolved murder cases from when he was still on active duty‿buries himself in witness statements and reports up to the point of exhaustion. He spends hours at the crime scene and employs his special technique of “thought sensitivity,â€? an abstract, intuitive process that may very well lead him to the “fossilâ€?‿that crucial piece of information he needs to solve the case.   Once again, Ani combines deep sorrow, human darkness, and breath-taking tension in a novel whose melancholy can hardly be surpassed.

Poetically written and originally given as lectures, this is a moving essay collection from Durs Grÿnbein. In his four Lord Weidenfeld Lectures held in Oxford in 2019, German poet Durs Grÿnbein dealt with a topic that has occupied his mind ever since he began to perceive his own position within the past of his nation, his linguistic community, and his family: How is it possible that history can determine the individual poetic imagination and segregate it into private niches? Shouldn‿t poetry look at the world with its own sovereign eyes instead?   In the form of a collage or “photosynthesis,â€? in image and text, Grÿnbein lets the fundamental opposition between poetic license and almost overwhelming bondage to history appear in an exemplary way. From the seeming trifle of a stamp with the portrait of Adolf Hitler, he moves through the phenomenon of the “Fÿhrer‿s streetsâ€? and into the inferno of aerial warfare. In the end, Grÿnbein argues that we are faced with the powerlessness of writing and the realization, valid to this day, that comes from confronting history. As he muses, “There is something beyond literature that questions all writing.â€?

Four classical Greek myths retold with unexpected twists by an East German dissident.  Franz Fÿhmann‿s subversive retellings of four Greek legends were first published in East Germany in 1980. In them, Fÿhmann plumbs the ancient tales‿ depths and makes them his own. Attuned to conflict and paradox, he sheds light on the complexities of sex and love, art and beauty, politics and power. In the title story, the love of the goddess Eos for the mortal Tithonos reveals the blessing and curse of transience, while “Hera and Zeusâ€? probes the divine couple‿s tumultuous relationship and its devastating consequences for a world embroiled in war. Fÿhmann‿s unflinching account of Marsyas‿ flaying by Apollo has been widely read as a dissident political statement that has lost none of its incisive force. At times charged with sensuality, and at others honed to a keen analytical edge, Fÿhmann‿s shimmering prose is matched by Sunandini Banerjee‿s exquisite collages.

One of Germany's greatest living writers offers up an analysis (and samples) of his failed projects. "My dear fellow artists, whether writers, actors, painters, film-makers, singers, sculptors, or composers, why are you so reluctant to talk about your minor or major failures?" With that question, Hans Magnus Enzensberger--the most senior among Germany's great writers--begins his amusing ruminations on his favorite projects that never saw the light of day. There is enlightenment in every embarrassing episode, he argues, and while artists tend to forget their successes quickly, the memory of a project that came to nothing stays in the mind for years, if not decades. Triumphs hold no lessons for us, but fiascos can extend our understanding, giving insight into the conditions of production, conventions, and practices of the industries concerned, and helping novices to assess the snares and minefields in the industry of their choice. What's more, Enzensberger argues, flops have a therapeutic effect: They can cure, or at least alleviate, the vocational illnesses of authors, be it the loss of control or megalomania. In Gone but Not Forgotten, Enzensberger looks back at his uncompleted experiments not just in the world of books but also in cinema, theater, opera, and journal publishing, and shares with us a "store of ideas" teeming with sketches of still-possible projects. He also reflects on the likely reasons for these big and small defeats. Interspersed among his ruminations are excerpts from those experiments, giving readers a taste of what we missed. Together, the pieces in this volume build a remarkable picture of a versatile genius's range of work over more than half a century and make us reflect on the very nature of success and failure by which we measure our lives.