Books in the The Seagull Library of German series

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.

A diary-like sequence of poems from one of Austria's best-known contemporary voices. Exploring longing, lust for life, aging, mortality, grief, and flowers in her inimitable late style, études is a diary-like sequence of poems by one of the greatest living Austrian poets. Friederike Mayröcker's almost daily entries give us a unique view into the interplay between desire and her motivation for writing. In Mayröcker's case, she writes both to keep a vanished world present and to exploit the possibilities of being present for constant experimentation.   The poems in this volume are not only studies of how the mind works, moving from fragment to fragment, but also experiments with techniques of repetition, typography, collage, and quotation. Mayröcker transforms the humble page into spaces of radical openness. After all, she says, a poem is that which "opens everything up." Each poem is date-stamped, and each date acts as a kind of permission for Mayröcker to pour in everything from notes on doctor's visits to gorgeously structured elegies to obsessively repeating fragments of memory that act upon the whole like bits of recurring melody.   Rarely before has the intimate process of writing been so exquisitely laid bare than in études. Traversing the boundaries of literary forms with Mayröcker's distinctive style, this important volume strikes an admirable balance between playfulness and serious inquiry.