Authors

By Stanley CorngoldA unique look at Thomas Mann’s intellectual and political transformation during the crucial years of his exile in the United States.In September 1938, Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize–winning author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, fled Nazi Germany for the United States. Heralded as “the greatest living man of letters,” Mann settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where, for nearly three years, he was stunningly productive as a novelist, university lecturer, and public intellectual. In The Mind in Exile, Stanley Corngold portrays in vivid detail this crucial station in Mann’s journey from arch-European conservative to liberal conservative to ardent social democrat.On the knife-edge of an exile that would last fully fourteen years, Mann declared, “Where I am, there is Germany. I carry my German culture in me.” At Princeton, Mann nourished an authentic German culture that he furiously observed was “going to the dogs” under Hitler. Here, he wrote great chunks of his brilliant novel Lotte in Weimar (The Beloved Returns); the witty novella The Transposed Heads; and the first chapters of Joseph the Provider, which contain intimations of his beloved President Roosevelt’s economic policies. Each of Mann’s university lectures—on Goethe, Freud, Wagner—attracted nearly 1,000 auditors, among them the baseball catcher, linguist, and O.S.S. spy Moe Berg. Meanwhile, Mann had the determination to travel throughout the United States, where he delivered countless speeches in defense of democratic values.In Princeton, Mann exercised his “stupendous capacity for work” in a circle of friends, all highly accomplished exiles, including Hermann Broch, Albert Einstein, and Erich Kahler. The Mind in Exile portrays this luminous constellation of intellectuals at an extraordinary time and place.Paperback258 pagesPrinceton University Press, 20246.13 x 9.25 in.ISBN 9780691232577Literary Theory, Biography

The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton (Paperback)

Artwork by Deborah Sengl Contributions by Marjorie Perloff, Matthias Goldmann, Anna Souchuk and Paul Reitter "Sengl expressly states that she is not in a position to offer a quick solution for all the injustices of our times. But her works urge us to cast a more open and more empathic view of our environment, and that would already be a very commendable first step."–Acid Rain "When the age died by its own hand, that hand was Karl Kraus."–Bertolt Brecht "No folly, no mendacity is exempt from Kraus’ gaze."–Marjorie Perloff With critical success over the past four years, artist Deborah Sengl (b. 1974) has exhibited taxidermied rats, drawings and paintings in order to restage Karl Kraus’ nearly-unperformable play The Last Days of Mankind (Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, 1915–22). Featuring Sengl’s entire installation, the DoppelHouse Press edition also includes essays that examine her ambitious dramaturgy, which condenses Kraus’ ten-to-fifteen hour drama into an abridged reading of its themes: human barbarism, war profiteering, the role of journalism in war, and the absurdities of nationalism. Select translations of Kraus’ original excerpted from the edition by Bridgham and Timms (Yale University Press, 2015) provide a window to see Kraus’ humor as well as his other “war” — a war on the misuses of language itself. Published in conjunction with the centenary anniversary of the Armistice, which ended The Great War but bred another soon to come, this edition of The Last Days of Mankind offers an agit-prop protest crossing the boundaries of art, literature and history and spanning the knowledge of the century that has passed since Kraus penned his play. Deborah Sengl offers her stylistic model for envisioning human folly through animal actors, who become more than human, while confronting a violence particular to humankind, laced with selfishness and greed. Contributors include modernist poetry scholar Marjorie Perloff (The Edge of Irony, University of Chicago Press 2015); arts writer Matthias Goldmann; Paul Reitter (editor/contributor to Jonathan Franzen’s The Kraus Project, Harper, 2013); and professor of German Languages and Literatures, Anna Souchuk. Hardcover176 pages | fully illustrated in colorDoppelHouse Press, 2018 The Last Days of Mankind was originally published in 19188.25 x 8.25 inchesISBN 9780999754412Conceptual Arts, Historical Literature

The Last Days of Mankind – A Visual Guide to Karl Kraus’ Great War Epic

By Franz Kafka Translated by Susan Bernofsky Introduction by David Cronenberg “This fine version, with David Cronenberg’s inspired introduction and the new translator’s beguiling afterword, is, I suspect, the most disturbing though the most comforting of all so far; others will follow, but don’t hesitate: this is the transforming text for you.”— Richard Howard Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella of unexplained horror and nightmarish transformation became a worldwide classic and remains a century later one of the most widely read works of fiction in the world. It is the story of traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. This hugely influential work inspired George Orwell, Albert Camus, Jorge Louis Borges, and Ray Bradbury, while continuing to unsettle millions of readers. In her new translation of Kafka’s masterpiece, Susan Bernofsky strives to capture both the humor and the humanity in this macabre tale, underscoring the ways in which Gregor Samsa’s grotesque metamorphosis is just the physical manifestation of his longstanding spiritual impoverishment. Paperback128 pagesW.W. Norton, 2014Originally published in 19155.5 x 8.3 inchesISBN 9780393347098

The Metamorphosis

By Hans FalladaTranslated by Michael Hofmann “The greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis.” — Primo Levi “One of the most extraordinarily ambitious literary resurrections in recent memory.” – The Los Angeles Time “A riveting page turner.” – NPR’s Fresh Air This unflinching masterpiece based on a true story of resistance is more timely than ever, as fascist forces in the 20th century find their home in the rhetoric of the modern right wing political agenda. Entering its 15th year of English translation, the brilliant Hans Fallada’s account of what The New Yorker called “a visceral, chilling portrait of … everyday German life during the war” follows a working-class couple in Berlin and grieving the loss of their son, launch a campaign to oppose the Nazi regime. Based on a true story from the files of the Gestapo, this sweeping saga of resistance is more relevant than ever in modern times, with the rise of right wing rhetoric echoed in global politics, and seen in increased book bannings and the reversal of womens’ and LGBTQ+ rights in the US. In the end, it’s more than an edge-of-your-seat thriller, more than a moving romance, even more than literature of the highest order—it’s a deeply stirring story of two people standing up for what’s right — even against impossible odds. Paperback592 pagesMelville House, 2024Originally published in 19475.5 x 8.25 InchesISBN 9781685891442Historical Fiction, Suspense Thriller

Every Man Dies Alone

By Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Edward Snow "This book has been central for many young poets, in many languages, for generations. Now, Edward Snow has created a fresh, inviting version in English."― Robert Pinsky "The Notebooks matches the literary heights of Rilke’s finest verse…Edward Snow’s new translation is an opportunity to revisit this elusive masterpiece."― Ratik Asokan, Nation A stunning, revelatory new translation of the only novel by one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, from one of “the most trustworthy and exhilarating of Rilke’s contemporary translators”―Michael Dirda, Washington Post A groundbreaking masterpiece of early European modernism originally published in 1910, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge unspools the vivid reflections of the titular young Danish nobleman and poet. From his Paris garret, Brigge records his encounters with the city and its outcasts, muses on his family history, and lays bare his earliest experiences of fear, tenderness, and desolation. With a poet’s feel for language and a keen instinct for storytelling, Rainer Maria Rilke forges a dazzlingly fractured coming-of-age narrative, kaleidoscopic in its alternation of vivid present encounters and equally alive memories of childhood. Strikingly contemporary, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge reveals a writer metabolizing his own experiences to yield still-essential questions about fiction and reality, empathy and psychosis, and―above all―life, love, and death. In a fascinating introduction, award-winning translator Edward Snow explores the overlaps between Rilke’s experiences and those of his protagonist, and shows with granular attention the novel’s capacity for nuance and sympathy. Snow’s exquisite translation captures as never before the astonishing cadences and musical clarity of the poet’s prose. It reveals The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as an urgent contemporary achievement, more than one hundred years after it was written. Paperback256 pagesW.W. Norton & Company, 2023Originally published in 19105.5 x 8.3 inchesISBN 9781324066088Literary Fiction

Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: A Novel (Paperback)

By Rainer Maria RilkeTranslated by Ulrich Baer In 1903, a student at a military academy sent some of his verses to a well-known Austrian poet, requesting an assessment of their value. The older artist, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), replied to the novice in this series of letters — an amazing archive of remarkable insights into the ideas behind Rilke's greatest poetry. The ten letters reproduced here were written during an important stage in Rilke's artistic development, and they contain many of the themes that later appeared in his best works. The poet himself afterwards stated that his letters contained part of his creative genius, making this volume essential reading for scholars, poetry lovers, and anyone with an interest in Rilke, German poetry, or the creative impulse.Hardcover74 pagesInsel Verlag GmbH, 2018Originally published in 19294.8 x 7.4 inchesISBN 9783458194507 Classic Literature

Letters to a Young Poet

By Richard Schacht “Schacht’s long-standing and important thesis concerning Nietzsche’s naturalism is brought to fruition in this book. Nietzsche Pursued offers an invaluable, enriching, and superbly argued sequence of engagements with this extremely important thinker. This is an outstanding and original contribution to the field of Nietzsche studies by one of its most notable scholars.”—Peter R. Sedgwick, Cardiff University “The future of humanity is Nietzsche’s central concern. Nietzsche Pursued addresses current debates in innovative and inspiring ways, proposing nuanced solutions beyond established dichotomies such as moralism versus nihilism, essentialism versus perspectivism, and naturalism versus humanism. Schacht’s artful way of making sense of Nietzsche draws on a life’s work of exceptional scholarship and walks a virtuous tightrope between false alternatives.” —Helmut Heit, director of the Kolleg Friedrich Nietzsche, Weimar An ambitious venture into Nietzsche’s envisioned philosophy for the future. Nietzsche advocated for a post-theistic “philosophy of the future”—a new approach to human reality that would bend Western thought away from nihilism in a life-affirming, value-creative direction. His early demise left this endeavor only just begun. In Nietzsche Pursued, Richard Schacht examines Nietzsche’s revisionist approach to familiar philosophical topics, exploring how some may be further pursued in Nietzschean ways. Each chapter focuses on one topic that is central to Nietzsche’s vision of what philosophy can and should be and do. Among them: his kind of naturalism, humanity, perspectivism, morality, and music. Building on his analysis in Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy, Schacht invites readers to see with new appreciation the ongoing significance of Nietzsche’s thought for philosophy’s future. Hardcover376 pagesUniversity of Chicago Press, 20246 x 9 inchesISBN 9780226834665 Modern Western Philosophy, Ethics and Morality

Nietzsche Pursued: Toward a Philosophy for the Future

Written and Illustrated by Nicolas MahlerTranslated by Alexander Booth "If you are Nicolas Mahler, the writer and illustrator of a short but engaging graphic biography of the man, you’d see [Kafka] as a sort of blob of hair and eyebrows on a stick. The illustrations of Completely Kafka may look rudimentary, but they work. In fact they’re similar in style to the doodles Kafka himself would make in his notebooks."—Spectator "Much the best thing about the book are the charming black and white drawings. The best are the drawings of Kafka himself, drawn in thick brushstroke. Some are like cartoons, a few are more like Kafka’s own drawings, angular, isolated."—Jewish Chronicle A delightfully witty and original graphic biography of Kafka, published to coincide with the centenary of the author’s death The young Franz Kafka has too many fears to name. Mirrors, clothing, his own body, almost everything causes him to fret. How did this ‘anxious and small bundle of bones’ become one of the world’s great writers? With telling details and sharply minimal illustrations, Nicolas Mahler tells a wickedly funny story of the development of Kafka’s genius, offering a tribute that is as playful as it is profound. Paperback128 pages Pushkin Press, 20245.35 x 8.44 inchesISBN 9781805331582Biography, Historic Graphic Novel

Completely Kafka: A Comic Biography

By Walter Benjamin Introduction by Stanley Mitchell Translated by Anna Bostock "A small bomb of ideas and vital argument."—Guardian"He does not abolish the distance between us and Leskov, or Brecht, or Kafka; he brings it to life."—Times Higher Education Supplement"If the killing of Lorca was Fascism’s first crime against literature, Benjamin’s death was undoubtedly the second."—The Listener A collection of essays of political philosophy by the renowned mid 20th-century critical theorist and literary critic The relationship between philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin and playwright-poet Bertolt Brecht was both a lasting friendship and a powerful intellectual partnership. Having met in the late 1920s in Germany, Benjamin and Brecht, both independently minded Marxists with a deep understanding of and passionate commitment to the emancipatory potential of cultural practices, continued to discuss, argue and correspond on topics as varied as Fascism and the work of Franz Kafka. Faced by the onset of the ‘midnight of the century’, with the Nazi subversion of the Weimar Republic in Germany and the Stalinist degeneration of the revolution in Russia, both men, in their own way, strove to keep alive the tradition of dialectical critique of the existing order and radical intervention in the world to transform it. In Understanding Brecht we find collected together Benjamin’s most sensitive and probing writing on the dramatic and poetic work of his friend and tutor. Stimulated by Brecht’s oeuvre and theorising his particular dramatic techniques—such as the famous ‘estrangement effect’—Benjamin developed his own ideas about the role of art and the artist in crisis-ridden society. This volume contains Benjamin’s introductions to Brecht’s theory or epic theatre and close textual analyses of twelve poems by Brecht (printed in translation here) which exemplify Benjamin’s insistence that literary form and content are indivisible. Elsewhere Benjamin discusses the plays The Mother, Terror and Misery of the Third Reich, and The Threepenny Opera, digressing for some general remarks on Marx and satire. Here we also find Benjamin’s masterful essay “The Author as Producer” as well as an extract from his diaries that records the intense conversations held in the late 1930s in Denmark (Brecht’s place of exile) between the two most important cultural theorists of this century. In these discussions, the two men talked of subjects as diverse as the work of Franz Kafka, the unfolding Soviet Trials, and the problems of literary work on the edge of international war. Paperback144 PagesVerso, 20245 1 1/12 x 7 4/5 InchesISBN 9781804294796Literary Criticism, Theory and Aesthetics

Understanding Brecht

By Franz KafkaTranslated by Idris Parry A brilliant translation of one of the greatest works of Franz Kafka, author of Metamorphosis, telling the haunting story of a man’s desperate search for answers amid his prosecution for an unknown crime. A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis—an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life—including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door—becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral. Paperback208 pagesPenguin Random House, 2024Originally published in 19255-1/16 x 7-3/4 inchesISBN 9780241678893Literature

The Trial (Penguin Classics)

By Franz KafkaIntroduction by Idris ParryTranslated by J. A. Underwood An acclaimed translation of the final work by Franz Kafka—author of Metamorphosis and some of the twentieth century’s greatest literature—following the story of a man’s bizarre, unending struggle to carry out his mysterious new job The Castle is the story of K., the unwanted land surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home. As he encounters dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, and reason and nonsense, K.’s struggles in the absurd, labyrinthine world where he finds himself seem to reveal an inexplicable truth about the nature of existence. Kafka began The Castle in 1922 and it was never finished, yet this, the last of his three great novels, draws fascinating conclusions that make it feel strangely complete. Paperback320 PagesPenguin Classics, 2024Originally Published in 19265-1/16 x 7-3/4 InchesISBN 9780241678916Literature, Fiction

The Castle (Penguin Classics)

By Franz KafkaTranslated and Edited by Mark Harman"The translations are surely definitive – Harman’s grasp of the German language is as comprehensive as was the Czech-born Kafka’s – but the prime value of the book is in the annotation. Every nuance of language is flagged, every cross-reference is followed up, every subtle shade of humour is highlighted. This is academic work as it should be done, in faithful service to the text and to its readers."― John Banville, The Guardian “Richly illustrated and filled with fascinating references to contemporary sources, critical commentary and relevant passages from Kafka’s letters and diaries…Anyone interested in knowing more about these stories will find this volume a treasure trove.”―Karen Leeder, Times Literary Supplement “[This book] gives us crisp new translations of Franz Kafka’s best novellas and tales and also a substantial scholarly introduction to his life and work…Ironies…lurk in Kafka’s fiction: in dry, dispassionate sentences that deliver disconcerting changes of perspective and in slyly matter-of-fact descriptions of uncanny events. Harman’s translations recreate these subtle effects with admirable precision; and by uncovering the veins of humour and hope in Kafka’s dark art, he may well win new readers for this gentle master of the absurd.”―Joachim Redner, Australian Book Review A superb new translation of Kafka’s classic stories, authoritatively annotated and beautifully illustrated. Selected Stories presents new, exquisite renderings of short works by one of the indisputable masters of the form. Award-winning translator and scholar Mark Harman offers the most sensitive English rendering yet of Franz Kafka’s unique German prose—terse, witty, laden with ambiguities and double meanings. With his in-depth biographical introduction and notes illuminating the stories and placing them in context, Harman breathes new life into masterpieces that have often been misunderstood. Included are sixteen stories, arranged chronologically to convey a sense of Kafka’s artistic development. Some, like “The Judgment,” “In the Penal Colony,” “A Hunger Artist,” and “The Transformation” (usually, though misleadingly, translated as “The Metamorphosis”), represent the pinnacle of Kafka’s achievement. Accompanying annotations highlight the wordplay and cultural allusions of the original German, pregnant with irony and humor that English readers have often missed. Although Kafka has frequently been cast as a loner, in part because of his quintessential depictions of modern alienation, he had a number of close companions. Harman draws on Kafka’s diaries, extensive correspondence, and engagement with early twentieth-century debates about Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and Zionism to construct a rich portrait of Kafka in his world. A work of both art and scholarship, Selected Stories transforms our understanding and appreciation of a singular imagination. Hardcover304 pagesBelknap Press, 20245.5 x .87 x 8.25 inchesISBN 9780674737983 Franz Kafka, Short Stories

Selected Stories

By Franz KafkaSelected and with an Introduction by Joshua CohenA new selection of Franz Kafka’s shorter fiction and nonfiction work, selected and with a preface by Book of Numbers author Joshua Cohen.“Being asked to write about Kafka is like being asked to describe the Great Wall of China by someone who’s standing just next to it. The only honest thing to do is point.” —Joshua Cohen, from his foreword to He: Shorter Writings of Franz KafkaThis is a Kafka emergency kit, a congregation of the brief, the minor works that are actually major. Joshua Cohen has produced a frame that refuses distinctions between what is a story, a letter, a workplace memo, and a diary entry, also including popular favorites like The Bucket Rider, The Penal Colony, and The Burrow. Here we see Kafka’s preoccupations in writing about animals, messiah variations, food, and exercise, each in his signature style.Cohen’s selection emphasizes the stately structure of utterly coherent logic within an utterly incoherent and illogical world, showing how Kafka harnessed the humblest grammar to metamorphic power, until the predominant effect ceases to be the presence of an unreliable narrator but the absence of the universe’s only reliable narrator—God. Paperback320 PagesPicador Paper, 20224.93 x 0.75 x 7.5 inchesISBN 9780374538941 Franz Kafka, Short Stories

He: Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka

By Frank Tallis "Stunning in its breadth and depth, this is a magisterial treatment of a towering thinker." - Publisher's Weekly (starred review)"Convincingly critical and convincingly admiring―among the best of innumerable Freud bios." - Kirkus (starred review)A chronicle of Vienna's Golden Age and the influence of Sigmund Freud on the modern world by a clinical psychologist whose mystery novels form the basis of PBS's Vienna Blood series.Some cities are like stars. When the conditions are right, they ignite, and burn with such fierce intensity that they outshine every other city on the planet. Vienna was one such city and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was the birthplace of the modern mind and the way we live today. Long coffee menus and celebrity interviews are Viennese inventions. ‘Modern’ buildings were appearing in Vienna long before they started appearing in New York and the idea of practical modern home design originated in the work of Viennese architect Adolf Loos. The place, however, where one finds the most indelible and profound impression of Viennese influence is inside your head. How we think about ourselves has been largely determined by Vienna’s most celebrated resident, Sigmund Freud.In Mortal Secrets, Frank Tallis brilliantly illuminates Sigmund Freud and his times, taking readers into the mind of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, chronicling the evolution of psychoanalysis and opening up Freud’s life to embrace the Vienna he lived in and the lives of the people he mingled with from Gustav Klimt to Arnold Schönberg, Egon Schiele to Gustav Mahler. Mortal Secrets is a thrilling book about a heady time in one of the world’s most beautiful cities and its long shadow that extends through the twentieth century up until the present day.Hardcover 496 PagesSt. Martin's Press, 20246.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inchesISBN 9781250288950 Austrian History

Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Discovery of the Modern Mind

Contributions by Tommy Orange, Ali Smith, Naomi Alderman, Elif Batuman and Helen OyeyemiWhat happens when Kafka’s idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? Find out in this anthology of brand-new Kafka-inspired short stories by prizewinning, bestselling writers.Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of European literature. He’s been hailed a profit and a diagnostician, and a century after his death, his unique perspective on the anxieties, injustices, and rapidly shifting belief systems of the modern world continues to speak to our contemporary moment. From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to an apartment search that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by a twentieth-century visionary, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.Paperback208 pagesCatapult, 20245.5 x 8.25 inchesISBN 9781646222636 Franz Kafka, Short Story Anthology

A Cage Went in Search of a Bird (Ten Kafkaesque Short Stories)

By Frederic J. Schwartz “Once again Frederic Schwartz trains his bright light on the unstable frameworks of judgment: in early twentieth-century Germany they assumed a particular form – legal cases unveiled to the public. Aesthetics squirm and yield up new orders of morality. Political questions rise up, unbidden. One cannot ask for more. This is a most timely book.”–Molly Nesbit, Professor of Art on the Mary Conover Mellon Chair at Vassar College; author of The Pragmatism in the History of Art “This magnificent book cuts through the history of early-twentieth-century culture with a new epistemological instrument—the case—and shows what it meant to perceive the social world in cases. Everyone interested in the art and science of the 1920s has to read it.”–Anke te Heesen, Professor and Chair of the History of Science, Humboldt University, BerlinHow artists in twentieth-century Germany adapted the idea of the medical or legal case as an artistic strategy to push to the fore sexualities, scandals, and crimes that were otherwise concealed.In early twentieth-century Germany, the artistic avant-garde borrowed procedures from the medical and juridical realms to expose and debate matters that society preferred remain hidden and unspoken. Frederic J. Schwartz explores how the evocation or creation of a “case” provided artists with a means to engage themes that ranged from blasphemy to Lustmord, or sexual murder. Shedding light on the case as a cultural form, Schwartz shows its profound effect on artists and the ways it dovetailed with methods used by these figures to exploit fundamental changes taking place across the mass media of their time.As Schwartz shows, the case was a common denominator that connected seemingly disparate works. George Grosz and Rudolf Schlichter drew on it for their violent visual art, as did architect Adolf Loos when he equated ornament with crime. Expressionists, meanwhile, approached the question of whether the so-called “mad” shared a right of public expression with those deemed sane, and examined medical and legal approaches to what society labeled as insanity. The case also took on a personal dimension when artists found themselves confronted with, or chose to engage with, the legal system. German courts prosecuted John Heartfield and others for their provocative works, while Bertolt Brecht created publicity for himself by suing the firm to whom he sold the film rights to The Threepenny Opera. Provocative and insightful, The Culture of the Case offers a privileged view of the spaces of representation in which images—in some instances, as cases—functioned at a key moment of modernity.Hardcover432 pages | 30 color, 80 black-and-white illustrationsThe MIT Press, 20236 x 10 inchesISBN 9780262047708Art History, German Art

The Culture of the Case: Madness, Crime, and Justice in Modern German Art

By Rainer J. Hanshe"With its ingenious orchestration of the archive and its sensitivity to both the depths and inadvertencies of the creative process, Closing Melodies maps the twin stories of the last days of Friedrich Nietzsche and Vincent van Gogh within a phantasmagoria of space, time, and vision. Rainer J. Hanshe has an unparalleled grasp of what might be called the analytics of genius." - Nicholas Birns, New York UniversityAs the 19th century comes to a close, Friedrich Nietzsche and Vincent van Gogh unknowingly traverse proximate geographical terrain, nearly circling one another like close but distant stars as the philosopher wanders between Nizza, Sils Maria, and Torino, and the painter wanders between Paris, Arles, and Saint-Rémy. In the midst of their philosophical and artistic pursuits, simultaneously, the Eiffel Tower, symbol of artistic progress and industrialization, begins to rise in Paris amidst clamors of protest and praise.Through intertwining letters written to (& sometimes by) friends, family, and others, the philosopher and painter are brought into ever-greater proximity as we witness their daily personal and artistic struggles. Woven between and interrupting this panoply of voices are a series of intervals, short illuminating blasts, like a camera’s exploding flash powder, of artistic, scientific, political, and other events spanning 1888 to 1890, drawing Nietzsche and Van Gogh in and out of the wider expanses of history.As construction of the Eiffel Tower comes to completion in Paris and Elisabeth Förster, the sister of the philosopher of the will to power, tries to found a utopic race colony in South America, the lives of Nietzsche and Van Gogh come to their terrible denouements. Her brother now a full-fledged zombie, the former queen of Nueva Germania seizes the reins of his living corpse and rides him into the future.With no deus ex machina in sight, and none possible, WWI and the terrors and the beauties of the 20th century crack the horizon.Paperback836 pagesContra Mundum Press, 20236 x 1.85 x 9 inchesISBN 9781940625522History, Biography

Closing Melodies

This book was featured in our Lecture Series. Translated by Ulrich Baer from the collection edited by Rainer StammIntroduction by Jill LloydThe painter Paula Modersohn-Becker and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke were two of the most talented and original creative artists at work in early twentieth-century Europe. They enjoyed a close friendship that left in its wake a remarkable series of letters. Encompassing topics such as art, literature, and the nature of marriage, their correspondence testifies to both writers’ brilliant descriptive gifts and penetrating social intelligence. Brought together in English for the first time, the letters that Modersohn-Becker and Rilke sent to one another provide a fascinating view of everyday life during an exceptionally fertile and exciting period of cultural production.Paperback120 pagesEris Press, 20247.8 x 5.1 inchesISBN 9781916809901Biography, Correspondence, Art History

The Modersohn-Becker/Rilke Correspondence

By Mary Bergstein “Visual Cultures in Freud's Vienna provides for the first time a serious and comprehensive account of seeing in Freud's Vienna. With the acumen of a brilliant historian of photography and the visual arts, Bergstein meticulously reconstructs the visual ambience of fin-de-siècle Austria, exposing many of the subliminal patterns of seeing in Freud's world. A necessary read for those engaged in understanding how our visual world limits and expands our understanding of psychic processes.” ―Sander Gilman, Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Director, Program of Psychoanalysis, Emory University, USA Visual Culture in Freud's Vienna shows how photography and film in turn-of-the-century Vienna (the birthplace of psychoanalysis) not only reflected modernist ideas already in force, but helped to bring into being what might be referred to as a “psychoanalytic imagination.” Mary Bergstein demonstrates that visual images not only illustrated, but also engendered ways of seeing social, psychological, and scientific ideas during a formative time in the creation and development of psychoanalysis and the modern age. Indeed, she argues that visual culture initiated significant aspects of psychoanalytic thought.Visual Culture in Freud's Vienna examines a variety of visual materials and texts, ranging from scientific illustrations to popular "low culture" and even forms of erotica, including film. Attention is also given to women's dresses and shoes in a social context and as they are represented in photography and circulated as fetish objects.Bergstein maintains a commitment to women's history and feminist inquiry throughout, particularly in her final chapter, which is devoted to the representations of women in the erotic photography and film. Visual Culture in Freud's Vienna is well illustrated with images drawn from the sources discussed and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of modernism and psychoanalysis.Paperback240 pages | 68 color and black-and-white imagesBloomsbury Academic, 20245.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inchesISBN 9798765111956 Sigmund Freud, Viennese Culture

Visual Culture in Freud's Vienna: Science, Eros, and the Psychoanalytic Imagination

By Heinrich MieierTranslated by Justin Gottschalk A reappraisal of Ecce Homo and The Antichrist within Nietzsche’s oeuvre.Nietzsche’s Legacy takes on the most challenging and misunderstood works in Nietzsche’s oeuvre to illuminate his view of what a philosopher is and what constitutes a philosophic life. Interpreting Ecce Homo and The Antichrist as twin books meant to replace the abandoned Will to Power project, Heinrich Meier recovers them from the stigma of Nietzsche’s late mental collapse, showing that these works are, above all, a lucid self-assessment. The carefully written pair contains both the highest affirmation—the Yes of the “revaluation of all values”—and the most resolute negation—the No to Christianity. How the Yes and the No go together, how the relation between nature and politics is to be determined, how Nietzsche’s intention is governing the political-philosophical double-face: this is the subject of Nietzsche’s Legacy, which opens up a new understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole.Hardcover288 pagesUniversity of Chicago Press, 20246 x 9 inchesISBN 9780226751979Theory, Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche’s Legacy: Ecce Homo and The Antichrist, Two Books on Nature and Politics

With an Introduction by Will StoneTranslated by Will StoneAn intimate glimpse into the life and letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. In July 1921, displaced European poet Rainer Maria Rilke sequestered himself in the chateau of Muzot, a thirteenth-century medieval tower perched in the vineyards above the town of Sierre in the Canton Valais, Switzerland. In this sun-flooded landscape of the Rhone Valley, he found beguiling echoes of Spain and his beloved Provence. Here, the Duino Elegies were famously completed and the Sonnets to Orpheus followed. During this time, Rilke’s correspondence also bloomed, and Letters around a Garden collects some of those letters together into English for the first time. One intriguing exchange from 1924 to 1926 was with a young aristocratic Swiss woman Antoinette de Bonstetten, a passionate horticulturist who had been recommended as a potential advisor for the redesign and upkeep of the Muzot rose garden. In twenty-two precious letters originally written in French, Rilke relishes the prospect of their elusive meeting, keenly discusses the plans for his garden, and wittily laments the trials of his plants. Beyond the encomium for Paul Valéry and poignant memory of place are passages of exquisite writing, in which Rilke evokes with trademark sensitivity the delicate relationship between the changing seasons and the natural world of his adopted region. We also witness the loving relationship evolve between these sometime-fugitive correspondents and how questions of solitariness and companionship impinge on one who faces unaccustomed challenges as his health tragically declines.Paperback96 pages | 3 halftones Seagull Books, 20245 x 8 inches ISBN 9781803093345Literature, Letters

Letters around a Garden: Rainer Maria Rilke

By Keiron Pim"Utterly engrossing. Endless Flight is a biography of deep humanity, one that captures the individual, the place and the times with acute and affecting brilliance. I loved it." —Philippe Sands, author of The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive The mercurial, self-mythologising novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, author of the 20th-century masterpiece The Radetzky March, was the finest observer and chronicler of his age. Endless Flight travels with Roth from his childhood in the town of Brody on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an unsettled life spent roaming Europe between the wars, including spells in Vienna, Paris and Berlin. His decline mirrored the collapse of civilised Europe: in his last peripatetic decade, he opposed Nazism in exile from Germany, his wife succumbed to schizophrenia and he died an alcoholic on the eve of WWII.Exploring the role of Roth’s absent father in his imaginings, his attitude to his Jewishness and his restless search for home, Keiron Pim’s gripping account of Roth’s chaotic life speaks powerfully to us in our era of uncertainty, refugee crises and rising ethno-nationalism. Published as Roth’s works rapidly gain new readers and recognition, Endless Flight delivers a visceral yet sensitive portrait of his quest for belonging, and a riveting understanding of the brilliance and beauty of his work.Paperback544 pagesGranta Books, 20235.08x 1.18 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781783785117Biography, Exile Literature

Endless Flight: The Genius and Tragedy of Joseph Roth [Paperback]

Von Joseph Roth Lemberg, Moskau, Astrachan — in der Zweit zwischen den Kriegen erkundet Joseph Roth Osteuropa. Mit meisterhaften Reportagen fängt den Alltag der jungen Sowjetunion ein und stößt dabei auf Probleme, die uns heute noch bewegen. Paperback136 pagesText in GermanBeck C.H., 20155.12 x 0.59 x 8.07 inchesISBN 9783406800061Literature, Non-Fiction

Reisen in die Ukraine und nach Russland

By Franz Kafka Edited by Reiner Stach Translated by Shelley Frisch "Taut translations. . . . Indispensable commentary."—Max Norman, Wall Street Journal"An astute and subtle commentary. . . . The intellectual risks of commenting on the comments of Kafka are enormous, but Stach takes them in his stride, and Shelley Frisch’s English version keeps pace admirably."—Michael Wood, London Review of Books“In Shelley Frisch’s inspired translation and Reiner Stach’s lucid decipherment, Kafka’s crystalline aphorisms—his most beautifully faceted and intricately intimate creations—reveal themselves anew.”—Benjamin Balint, author of Kafka’s Last TrialA splendid new translation of an extraordinary work of modern literature—featuring facing-page commentary by Kafka’s acclaimed biographer.In 1917 and 1918, Franz Kafka wrote a set of more than 100 aphorisms, known as the Zürau aphorisms, after the Bohemian village in which he composed them. Among the most mysterious of Kafka’s writings, they explore philosophical questions about truth, good and evil, and the spiritual and sensory world. This is the first annotated, bilingual volume of these extraordinary writings, which provide great insight into Kafka’s mind. Edited, introduced, and with commentaries by preeminent Kafka biographer and authority Reiner Stach, and freshly translated by Shelley Frisch, this beautiful volume presents each aphorism on its own page in English and the original German, with accessible and enlightening notes on facing pages.The most complex of Kafka’s writings, the aphorisms merge literary and analytical thinking and are radical in their ideas, original in their images and metaphors, and exceptionally condensed in their language. Offering up Kafka’s characteristically unsettling charms, the aphorisms at times put readers in unfamiliar, even inhospitable territory, which can then turn luminous: “I have never been in this place before: breathing works differently, and a star shines next to the sun, more dazzlingly still.”Above all, this volume reveals that these multifaceted gems aren’t far removed from Kafka’s novels and stories but are instead situated squarely within his cosmos—arguably at its very core. Long neglected by Kafka readers and scholars, his aphorisms have finally been given their full due here.Paperback256 pages | 9 black-and-white illustrationsText in English and German Princeton University Press, 2023Originally published in 19315.5 x 8.5 inchesISBN 9780691254784Literature, German Literature Criticism

The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka [Paperback]

Edited by Diana Secker Tesdell “An excellent new anthology. . . . I’ve long admired Tesdell’s Everyman’s Pocket Classic thematic anthologies for their judicious story selections. Like some of the artists depicted in this one, she creates works that are pleasing, beautiful and surprising.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Stories of Art and Artists gathers two centuries of classic stories from around the world. From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful” and Albert Camus’s “The Artist at Work” to Bernard Malamud’s “Rembrandt’s Hat” and Aimee Bender’s “The Color Master,” the tales collected here range from haunting fables about the power of art to vivid portraits of those who create.Writers have long been fascinated by the idea of artistic genius, the relationship between portraits and their subjects, the inspirational role of muses, and the effects on artists of ambition, failure, and success. Art forms featured in these pages include sculpture, pottery, architecture, miniatures, landscapes, portraits, and abstract painting, illumined in brilliant stories by such great writers as Honoré de Balzac, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Marguerite Yourcenar, John Berger, William Boyd, Doris Lessing, Valerie Martin, Julian Barnes, Orhan Pamuk, and A. S. Byatt. Their dazzling literary evocations of the visual arts—using one art form to reflect on another—make Stories of Art and Artists an irresistible gift for lovers of art of all kinds.Hardcover400 pagesEveryman's Library, 20144.25 x 7.25 inchesISBN 9780375712494Short Stories, Fiction

Stories of Art and Artists

By Walter BenjaminIntroduction by George SteinerTranslated by John Osborne"He drew, from the obscure disdained German baroque, elements of the modern sensibility: the taste for allegory, surrealist shock effects, discontinuous utterance, a sense of historical catastrophe."—Susan Sontag"If the killing of Lorca was Fascism’s first great crime against literature, Benjamin’s death was undoubtedly the second."—The Listener"Walter Benjamin is the most important German aesthetician and literary critic of this century."—George SteinerThe Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer and the theatre of Calderon and Shakespeare. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history. Georg Lukacs, an opponent of Benjamin's aesthetics, singled out The Origin of German Tragic Drama as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.Paperback256 pagesVerso Publishers, 20235 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781804290460Literary Theory

The Origin of German Tragic Drama

By Walter BenjaminTranslated from the German by Harry ZohnA classic account of late nineteenth-century Paris and a study of Baudelaire’s life and workWalter Benjamin, one of the foremost cultural commentators and theorists of this century, is perhaps best known for his analyses of the work of art in the modern age and the philosophy of history.Yet it was through his study of the social and cultural history of the late nineteenth-century Paris, examined particularly in relation to the figure of the great Parisian lyric poet Charles Baudelaire, that Benjamin tested and enriched some of his core concepts and themes. Contained within these pages are, amongst other insights, his notion of the flaneur, his theory of memory and remembrance, his assessment of the utopian Fourier and his reading of the modernist movement.Paperback192 pagesVerso, 20235 x 1 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781904290453Theory, Modernism

Charles Baudelaire

By Colm TóibínA New York Times Notable Book, Critic’s Top Pick, and Top Ten Book of Historical Fiction“Compelling… This is an enormously ambitious book, one in which the intimate and the momentous are exquisitely balanced…Tóibín has fashioned an epic.”—The Guardian“An intimate portrait of Thomas Mann… In The Magician, Tóibín presents a rare view into the making of serious art and, in the process, shows he is a powerful magician himself.” —Chicago Review of Books The Magician opens in a provincial German city at the turn of the twentieth century, where the boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice. He is the most successful novelist of his time, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, a public man whose private life remains secret. He is expected to lead the condemnation of Hitler, whom he underestimates. His oldest daughter and son, leaders of Bohemianism and of the anti-Nazi movement, share lovers. He flees Germany for Switzerland, France and, ultimately, America, living first in Princeton and then in Los Angeles.Paperback512 pagesScribner, 20226 x 1.4 x 9 inchesISBN 9781476785097Thomas Mann, Historical Fiction

The Magician [Paperback]

By Hermann HesseTranslated from the German by Damion Searls“One of humanity’s most beautiful love letters to trees.” ―The Marginalian “Nature frequently brings out our deepest thoughts, but few can express those thoughts better than Hermann Hesse does in this anthology.” —New York Journal of Books An elegant collection of Hermann Hesse’s essays, poems, and passages on the subject of trees and nature, accompanied by thirty-one of his watercolor illustrations. Hermann Hesse understood trees to be symbols of transcendence and rebirth, of instinctive growth present in all natural life. This elegant collection of his essays, poems, and passages on trees, accompanied by thirty-one of his watercolor illustrations, reveals his inspired thoughts on nature, spirituality, and self-knowledge. Together, his writings and paintings mirror the seasons and landscapes as he experienced them, and help remind us that trees’ annual rings are representations of our own days’ struggle, happiness, and purpose.In the author’s words: “They struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws . . . Whoever has learned to listen to trees no longer wants to be one. He wants to be nothing except who he is.”Hardcover 136 pages | 31 full-color watercolors from Hermann HesseKales Press, 20225.3 x 0.7 x 7.4 inchesISBN 9781737832713 Anthology, Nature Writing

Trees: An Anthology of Writings and Paintings

By Hermann HesseTranslated by Elisabeth LaufferIllustrated by Jakob Hübner"A charming book for nature and literature lovers...leaving audiences feeling as lucky to encounter it as Hesse felt about meeting his winged subjects."―Foreword Reviews This volume gathers the most alluring stories, recollections, contemplations and poems on butterflies by Herman Hesse. "I have always had a connection with butterflies and other fleeting and ephemeral beauties, while I have never succeeded in maintaining permanent, committed and so-called solid relationships," writes Hermann Hesse in a letter from 1926. This preference, occasionally resembling an elective affinity, for "flowers and butterflies, that are of everlasting things, a fleeting allegory" – as he says in one of his poems, has left its mark on Hesse’s entire oeuvre.Hardcover136 pages | 110 full-color engraved copper illustrations Kales Press, 20235.3 x 0.7 x 7.3 inchesISBN 9798985955859 Anthology, Nature Writing

Butterflies: Reflection, Tales, and Verse

By Andrew NagorskiA dramatic true story about Sigmund Freud’s last-minute escape to London following the German annexation of Austria and the group of friends who made it possible.In March 1938, German soldiers crossed the border into Austria and Hitler absorbed the country into the Third Reich. Anticipating these events, many Jews had fled Austria, but the most famous Austrian Jew remained in Vienna, where he had lived since early childhood. Sigmund Freud was eighty-one years old, ill with cancer, and still unconvinced that his life was in danger.But several prominent people close to Freud thought otherwise, and they began a coordinated effort to persuade Freud to leave his beloved Vienna and emigrate to England. The group included a Welsh physician, Napoleon’s great-grandniece, an American ambassador, Freud’s devoted youngest daughter Anna and his personal doctor.Saving Freud is the story of how this remarkable collection of people finally succeeded in coaxing Freud, a man who seemingly knew the human mind better than anyone else, to emerge from his deep state of denial about the looming catastrophe, allowing them to extricate him and his family from Austria so that they could settle in London. There Freud would live out the remaining sixteen months of his life in freedom.Paperback352 pagesSimon & Schuster, 20235.5 x 0.88 x 8.38 inchesISBN 9781982172848Biography, Sigmund Freud

Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brough Him to Freedom

By Bruno Schulz Translated by Stanley Bill The stories in this collection are rich, tangled, and suffused with mystery and wonder. In the narrowing, winding city streets, strange figures roam. Great flocks of birds soar over rooftops, obscuring the sun. Cockroaches appear through cracks and scuttle across floorboards. Individuals careen from university buildings to dimly lit parlour rooms, through strange shops and endless storms.Crowded with moments of stunning beauty, the stories in this collection showcase Schulz’s darkly modern sensibility, and his status as one of the great transformers of the ordinary into the fantastical.Paperback224 pages Pushkin Press, 20224.81 x 0.79 x 6.45 inchesISBN 9781782277897Literature, Classics

Nocturnal Apparitions

By Karl KrausTranslated by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms"[A] superb translation."—Bill Marx, Arts FuseKraus’s iconic WWI drama, a satirical indictment of the glory of war, now in English in its entirety for the first time.One hundred years after Austrian satirist Karl Kraus began writing his dramatic masterpiece, The Last Days of Mankind remains as powerfully relevant as the day it was first published. Kraus’s play enacts the tragic trajectory of the First World War, when mankind raced toward self-destruction by methods of modern warfare while extolling the glory and ignoring the horror of an allegedly “defensive” war. This volume is the first to present a complete English translation of Kraus’s towering work, filling a major gap in the availability of Viennese literature from the era of the War to End All Wars.Bertolt Brecht hailed The Last Days as the masterpiece of Viennese modernism. In the apocalyptic drama Kraus constructs a textual collage, blending actual quotations from the Austrian army’s call to arms, people’s responses, political speeches, newspaper editorials, and a range of other sources. Seasoning the drama with comic invention and satirical verse, Kraus reveals how bungled diplomacy, greedy profiteers, Big Business complicity, gullible newsreaders, and, above all, the sloganizing of the press brought down the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the dramatization of sensationalized news reports, inurement to atrocities, and openness to war as remedy, today’s readers will hear the echo of the fateful voices Kraus recorded as his homeland descended into self-destruction. Paperback672 pagesYale University Press, 20235.91 x 1.42 x 8.98 InchesISBN 9780300271171Literature, Satire

Last Days of Mankind

By Sigmund FreudTranslated by Ulrich BaerWith essays by Carl E. Schorske and Richard Rorty “The price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.”Civilization and Its Discontents is widely considered Freud’s most important and most brilliant work. In it Freud examines why today’s society causes suffering on such a vast scale and whether the human drives for pleasure and aggression can ever be reconciled. This lively new translation with helpful explanatory notes captures Freud’s engaging tone for a twenty-first-century audience and includes essays by two of Freud’s most insightful and renowned interpreters, historian Carl E. Schorske and philosopher Richard Rorty.Paperback119 pagesWarbler Press, 2022Originally published 19305.5 by 8.5 inchesISBN 9781957240589 Theory

Civilization and Its Discontents

This book was featured as part of our Literatur Café series. By Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Ulrich Baer “It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will one distant day simply live your way into the answer.” In this slim collection of ten letters, written to an aspiring poet in the early 1900s, Rilke speaks with his unique insistence about living your true, authentic life. Countless readers have found inspiration, wisdom, and guidance in these deeply personal letters now famous the world over. Paperback100 pagesWarbler Press, 2022Originally published in 19295 x 8 inchesISBN 9781959891116Literature

By Friedrich Nietzsche Edited and translated by Ulrich Baer Friedrich Nietzsche presented many of his greatest insights in pithy, well-turned short phrases that do not follow any philosophical dogma. Instead, his chastening but ultimately life-affirming philosophy puts forth true love and friendship as our best hope in dark times. Here are Nietzsche’s key sayings about love from the vast body of his philosophical writings, which have influenced politics, philosophy, art and culture like few other works of world literature. As the first edition of its kind, this collection presents Nietzsche’s thoughts on love not as academic philosophy but as a guide to life. At turns delightful and astute—and always wise—Nietzsche on Love offers an original and startling glimpse into what one of the world’s foremost thinkers says about the fundamental experience of our lives. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar. One of the greatest thinkers of all time, his ideas have exerted an immeasurable influence on philosophy, politics, art, literature, psychology, and popular culture around the world.Paperback 138 pages Warbler Press, 20205.06 x 0.35 x 7.81 inchesISBN 9781734452570Poetry, Letters

Nietzsche on Love

By Robert Musill Translated by Genese GrillAlthough known principally for his modernist masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil (1880-1942) was also a playwright and drama critic. Musil's plays and theatrical investigations, written between 1921-1929, are inseparable form his later literary work and from his life-long commitment to art as a social and cultural activity. His brilliant plays and critical writings are not minor aspects of his artistic life, but essential works, preparing the way for and intrinsically connected to his great, unfinished novel.In the theater of the fraught period between the two world wars, Musil recognized a crisis that was symptomatic of larger social, political, and aesthetic problems. In seeing Art as a social and cultural stimulus, he leveled piercing critiques at the commodification and conformism of the Culture Industry of his time and pointed the way toward a living, transformative theater.As an observer and researcher of the psychology of aesthetic experience, a student of anthropology and mysticism, and a writer who sometimes practiced the art of literature like an essayist and scientific experimenter, Musil saw in theater the ideal testing ground for questions about perception, reality, and the effects of ritual practices like formal variation, repetition, and the suspension of normal consciousness. In contrast to the mostly shallow entertainment on offer, Musil saw the potential of theater and all of art as a force that could incite existential shattering of received ideas and a renewal of "motivated" existence.Theater Symptoms constitutes not only the first volume in English of Musil's finished plays and a selection of play fragments with a large body of previously untranslated critical work, including manifestoes of his utopian theatrical vision. His theoretical essays and reviews elucidate the symptoms of and possible cures for the dangerous decline, not only of theater or art, but also, in Musil's view, of social relations: a descent from an ethico-aesthetic and "motivated" conduct of life to that of an uncritical, ethically lazy, aesthetically insensitive, and consumer-driven society. Musil's reviews of Stanislavski's Moscow Troupe, cabaret performances of Yvette Guilbert, the Yiddish theater, Expressionist stage innovations, productions of Shakespeare, Shaw, Schnitzler, Chekhov, and others, reveal Musil as a perceptive and visionary analyst of what theater was and what it could be.Paperback622 pagesContra Mundum Press, 2020‎5 x 1.38 x 7.99 inchesISBN 9781940625416Theater, Essays

Theater Symptoms: Plays and Writings on Drama

By Robert MusilTranslated by Genese GrillIn 1911, following his 1906 debut, The Confusions of Young Törless, Robert Musil published the two experimental stories that make up Unions. “The Completion of Love” and “The Temptation of Quiet Veronica” were some of Musil’s earliest forays into what would become a life-long exploration of the life, adventures, and psychological processes of his fiancé, Martha Marcovaldi — the future Martha Musil.When Musil later wrote of the “two authors” of his great unfinished work, The Man without Qualities, the co-author referred to was no other than Martha. The stories in Unions, drawn from Martha’s life, explode conventional morality; explore questions of self, union, and dissolution of self; and approximate exceptional sensations of erotic and intellectual perception in a shimmering and exceedingly dense proliferation of metaphors.The images, Musil tells us in a note, are the bone, not just the skin, of these carefully crafted stories. Each word is as motivated as the internal and external moments it attempts to embody in language. Although Musil did not continue to work in this experimental style in his later writing, in a late note he affirmed that Unions, the fruit of much artistic struggle and deep personal engagement, was the only one of his books that he sometimes still read from.This is a new English-language translation of the two stories and the first one to appear — in the form of Musil’s original publication — as Unions. A scholarly introduction by the translator, Genese Grill, explains the provenance of the stories and the need for a new approach to this book so central to his oeuvre.Paperback178 pagesContra Mundum Press, 20195 x 0.41 x 8 inchesISBN 9781940625300Literature

Unions

By Robert Musil & Klaus AmannTranslated by Genese Grill Literature and Politics presents Robert Musil's writings on the relationship between literature and politics from World War I through World War II and elucidates his personal struggle to bear witness during the Age of Totalitarianism. In essays, addresses, aphorisms, and unpublished notes on contemporary events, Musil charts the increasing dangers to artists and ethical thinkers of extreme ideological conscription, the subtle and not so subtle changes in public and political discourse, the epoch-making events and dire existential threats of his times. Musil acts as a cultural seismographer, interrogating causes and symptoms in himself and his world, as he moves between Nazi Germany and pre- and post-Anschluß Austria, ultimately escaping to Switzerland where he and his Jewish wife, Martha, lived in exile until his death in 1942. The writings question concepts of race, identity, and nation, and untangle the complex relationship between nation and artist and between the individual and the collective, celebrating the rich and irreducible nature of individual creative work as the bulwark of a free, ethical, and pluralistic society.Klaus Amann provides an invaluable introduction to Musil's political thought and his struggle, during the war years, to come to terms, to survive, and to find some way to bear witness. Amann recounts Musil's political trajectory, from fairly indifferent aesthete to socially-engaged supporter of the Weimar Republic and its liberal reforms, to critic of Nazi and Communist Totalitarianisms, and as prescient sceptic about the "cultural optimism" of the Soviet experiment. Musil's ultimate stance—as a thinker who radically resists taking final stances - is that politics endangers culture and humanity by dictating to artists how they should write, think, paint, compose, and by instrumentalizing art in the interest of ideology. Paperback562 pagesContra Mundum Press, 20235 x 1.25 x 8 inchesISBN 9781940625546Literature, History

Literature & Politics

By Friedrich NietzscheTranslated by Paul BishopThe Greek Music Drama marks an intriguing moment in the development of Nietzsche’s thought. Delivered in 1870 at the Basel Museum, it was the first public enunciation of the great themes that would echo throughout Nietzsche’s philosophy: the importance of aesthetic experience for culture, the primacy of the body and physiological drives, and the centrality of music to Greek tragedy. Here we see Nietzsche’s genealogical methodology in embryonic form alongside the anti-humanist aesthetics that will bloom in his later work. Addressing the material conditions of Greek theater in detail, Nietzsche repudiates the abstract scholarly approach to the art of classical antiquity, proposing that in its stead we cultivate different emotional and intellectual powers in order to gain greater insight into that art. This seminal lecture offers an account of tragic experience from the sole perspective of the Dionysian, presenting a reading of nature of startling and far-reaching implications.While The Greek Music Drama is a text written on the brink of the insights that inform The Birth of Tragedy, it stands on its own right as a singular text. This work is of considerable importance and is now made available in English for the very first time, with the translation set parallel to the original German in this elegant bilingual edition.Paul Bishop’s preface and informative critical notes and Jill Marsden’s illuminating introduction not only serve to make good the comparative neglect this seminal text has suffered in Nietzsche studies, they also lend the unique expertise of two Nietzsche scholars to the early thought of a philosopher who is crucial not just to philosophy scholars and aficionados, but to anyone interested in theater, performance, and the art of tragedy.Paperback112 pagesContra Mundum Press, 20137 x 0.23 x 10 inchesISBN 9780983697275Theory, Drama

The Greek Music Drama

By Rainer Maria RilkeForeword by Damion SearlsTranslated from the German by M.D. Herter NortonA gorgeous edition of one of the most beloved classics of the twentieth century, published in celebration of W. W. Norton’s 100th anniversary. This slim volume of letters from the poet and mystic, Rainer Maria Rilke, to a nineteen-year-old cadet and aspiring poet named Franz Xaver Kappus, has touched millions of readers since it was first published in English in 1934. The translator, Mary Dows Herter Norton—a polymath extraordinaire with expertise in music, literature, and science, and who, along with her husband, William Warder Norton, founded the company that bears his name—played a crucial role in elevating Rilke’s reputation in the English-speaking world. This Norton Centenary Edition commemorates Norton, known as “Polly” to friends and colleagues, and the 100th anniversary of the publishing company she co-founded. An admiring foreword by Damion Searls—himself a recent translator of Rilke’s Letters—celebrates Polly’s stylistic achievement, and an afterword by Norton’s President, Julia A. Reidhead, honors her commitment to maintaining W. W. Norton & Company’s independence. This handsome new edition of a beloved classic brings Rilke’s enduring wisdom about life, love, and art to a new generation, in the translation that first introduced him to the English-speaking world.Hardcover160 pagesW.W. Norton & Company, 20235.8 x 0.6 x 8.6ISBN 9781324050728Letters

Letters to a Young Poet (The Norton Centenary Edition)

By Lesley ChamberlainAn incisive and intimate account of the life and work of the great poet Rilke, exploring the rich interior world he created in his poetry.When Rilke died in 1926, his reputation as a great poet seemed secure. But as the tide of the critical avant-garde turned, he was increasingly dismissed as apolitical, as too inward. In Rilke: The Last Inward Man, acclaimed critic Lesley Chamberlain uses this charge as the starting point from which to explore the expansiveness of the inner world Rilke created in his poetry.Weaving together searching insights on Rilke’s life, work and reception, Chamberlain casts Rilke’s inwardness as a profound response to a world that seemed ever more lacking in spirituality. In works of dazzling imagination and rich imagery, Rilke sought to restore spirit to Western materialism, encouraging not narrow introversion but a heightened awareness of how to live with the world as it is, of how to retain a sense of transcendence within a world of collapsed spiritual certainty.Hardcover320 pagesPushkin Press5.7 x 0.96 x 8.8 inchesISBN 9781782277248Literature

Rilke: The Last Inward Man

Original Price: $45.00 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS Signed copies from translator Ross Benjamin are available. This book was featured as part of our Literatur Café series. By Franz Kafka Translated by Ross Benjamin “Essential . . . The new volume, in a sensitive and briskly idiomatic translation by Ross Benjamin, offers revelation upon revelation. It’s an invaluable addition to Kafka’s oeuvre.”—The New York Times “Franz Kafka’s inner life has always been a bit of a mystery. The expurgated diaries in their original German and English versions hinted at his complicated, often confused relationship to sex, politics, illness, and being Jewish. This readable new translation of the complete German version of the diary transforms the silent Kafka of a century ago into a Kafka not only of his times but of ours.”—Sander Gilman, author of Franz Kafka, The Jewish PatientAn essential new translation of the author’s complete, uncensored diaries—a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers.Dating from 1909 to 1923, the handwritten diaries contain various kinds of writing: accounts of daily events, reflections, observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, accounts of dreams, as well as finished stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of the diary entries and provides substantial new content, including details, names, literary works, and passages of a sexual nature that were omitted from previous publications. By faithfully reproducing the diaries’ distinctive—and often surprisingly unpolished—writing in Kafka’s notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author’s use of the diaries for literary experimentation and private self-expression, but also their value as a work of art in themselves.Hardcover704 pagesSchocken, 20236.2 x 9.25 inchesISBN 9780805243550Literature, Kafka

The Diaries of Franz Kafka

By Thomas MannTranslated by Damion Searls "In this vigorous new version . . . Searls takes pains to bring Mann’s decades-old prose to life without anachronism or false breeziness . . . A well-chosen, confidently translated gathering of stories that casts new light on its author."―Kirkus Reviews, starred review"Searls infuses the prose of Nobel laureate Mann (1875–1955) with momentum and energy in this excellent collection. English-language readers will find the humor and digressive appeal of Mann’s prose enhanced... A well-chosen excerpt from the novel Confessions of a Con Artist, by Felix Krull exhibits a connection between the title character, a peripatetic young man, and Mann’s other protagonists: “What a royal gift the imagination is, and what pleasure it affords us!” Felix narrates. Throughout, the characters are linked by their unspeakable desires, and their inner worlds are just as significant as, and often more so than, their actions. Scholars as well as those new to Mann will find much to appreciate in Searls’s stimulating approach."―Publishers WeeklySparkling new translations highlight the humor and poignancy of Mann’s best stories―including his masterpiece, in its first English translation in nearly a century. 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 Mann’s genius.The headliner of this volume, “Chaotic World and Childhood Sorrow” (in its first new translation since 1936)―a subtle masterpiece that reveals the profound emotional significance of everyday life―is Mann’s tender but sharp-eyed portrait of the “Bigs” and “Littles” of the bourgeois Cornelius family as they adjust to straitened circumstances in hyperinflationary Weimar Germany. Here, too, is a free-standing excerpt from Mann’s first novel, Buddenbrooks―a sensation when it was first published. “Death in Venice” (also included in this volume) is Mann’s most famous story, but less well known is that he intended it to be a diptych with another, comic story―included here as “Confessions of a Con Artist, by Felix Krull.” “Louisey”―a tale of sexual humiliation that gives a first glimpse of Mann’s lifelong ambivalence about the power of art―rounds out this revelatory, transformative collection. black-and-white frontispiece. Hardcover272 pagesLiveright, 20236.3 x 1 x 9.4 inchesISBN 9781631498480 Short Stories, Literature

Thomas Mann: New Selected Stories

By Thomas MannTranslated by John E. WoodsA classic of modern literature: Buddenbrooks is the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany facing the advent of modernity; in an uncertain new world, the family’s bonds and traditions begin to disintegrate. With an introduction by T. J. Reed.As Mann charts the Buddenbrooks’ decline from prosperity to bankruptcy, from moral and psychic soundness to sickly piety, artistic decadence, and madness, he ushers the reader into a world of stunning vitality, pieced together from births and funerals, weddings and divorces, recipes, gossip, and earthy humor.First published in Germany in 1901, when Mann was only twenty-six, Buddenbrooks surpasses all other modern family chronicles in its immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity. With remarkable fidelity to the original German text, this superb translation emphasizes the magnificent scale of Mann’s achievement in this riveting, tragic novel.Hardcover776 pagesEveryman's Library, 1994Originally published in 19015.34 x 8.34 inchesISBN 978-0679417378Literature

Buddenbrooks

By Irmgard KeunTranslated by Michael Hofmann The last novel from the acclaimed author of The Artificial Silk Girl, this 1950 classic paints a delightfully shrewd portrait of postwar German society. Upon his release from a prisoner-of-war camp, Ferdinand Timpe returns somewhat uneasily to civilian life in Cologne. Having survived against the odds, he is now faced with a very different sort of dilemma: How to get rid of his fiancée? Although he certainly doesn’t love the mild-mannered Luise, Ferdinand is too considerate to break off the engagement himself, so he sets about finding her a suitable replacement husband—no easy task given Luise’s high standards and those of her father, formerly a proud middle-ranking Nazi official.Featuring a lively cast of characters—from Ferdinand’s unscrupulous landlady with her black-market schemes to his beguiling cousin Johanna and the many loves of her life—Ferdinand captures a distinct moment in Germany’s history, when its people were coming to terms with World War II and searching for a way forward. In Irmgard Keun’s effervescent prose, the story feels remarkably modern.Paperback256 pagesOther Press, 20205.24 x 0.68 x 7.96 inchesISBN 9781635420357Literature

Ferdinand, The Man with the Kind Heart: A Novel

By Kirsty Bell“With sleuthing interest and novelistic flair, Kirsty Bell’s The Undercurrents has ruptured familiar terrain…an associative thesis on the dangers of repression, from gargantuan acts of genocide to the comparatively subtle shames of familial collapse…An enchanting and sometimes disturbing symbolism runs through The Undercurrents, as Bell imaginatively weaves the city’s hard factuality with the emotional and physical experience of living in it.”—frieze“From the first moment I heard Kirsty Bell read from her writing, I have yearned for the book she was then working on. And now here it is, perfect and perfectly balanced, a clear-eyed and beautifully written account about place, about consciousness. I treasure The Undercurrents, and so will you.”—Hilton Als, author of White Girls The Undercurrents is a dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a site at the center of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. The view from this house offers a ringside seat onto the city’s theater of action. The building has stood on the banks of the canal since 1869, its feet in the West but looking East, right into the heart of a metropolis in the making, on a terrain inscribed indelibly with trauma. When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell—a British-American art critic, adrift in her mid-forties—becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. Taking the view from her apartment window as her starting point, she turns to the lives of the house’s various inhabitants, to accounts penned by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city’s familiar narratives.Paperback400 pagesOther Press, 20225.26 x 1.05 x 7.97 inchesISBN 9781635423440Literature, Memoir

The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin

By Friedrich NietzscheIntroduction by Joanna KavennaTranslated by Michael Hulse In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s infamous protagonist sets off on a grand and noble quest to find meaning in a secular world and to live joyfully alongside the knowledge of death.In this new translation by Michael Hulse—the first in English by a poet—Zarathustra is revealed in all his bold and ironic splendor as a man who prizes self-worth above all else as a moral code to live by.Radical, uncategorizable, contradictory, and often humorous, Thus Spake Zarathustra is a grand celebration of human existence by one of the most influential thinkers of the past two centuries. Paperback328 pagesNotting Hill Editions, 20225.43 x 0.98 x 8.48 inchesISBN 9781910749258Philosophy

Thus Spake Zarathustra

By Ritchie Robertson "Robertson's Friedrich Nietzsche is destined to become the best short introduction to the life and writings of the philosopher. Robertson is not a Nietzsche apologist; he faces squarely and honestly Nietzsche's shortcomings. . . But at the same time he recognizes Nietzsche's importance for the history of philosophy and his seminal role in challenging the assumptions and easy truths of his predecessors. This type of balanced and informed account is rare in Nietzsche scholarship, and Robertson's scrupulous incorporation of previous research and exceptionally lucid prose make this book all the more welcomed as an introductory study."—Robert C. Holub, Ohio Eminent Scholar, professor, and chair of German languages and literatures, The Ohio State University An accessible and informative study of the life and work of this vaunted German philosopher. In this concise yet comprehensive critical biography, Ritchie Robertson examines the work of Friedrich Nietzsche within the context of his life. The book traces Nietzsche’s development from outstanding classical scholar to cultural critic, who measured Imperial Germany by the standards of ancient Greece. It follows him on his path from a prophet (in the persona of Zarathustra) to a savage polemicist against modern liberal values, offering a “philosophy of the future.” Robertson argues that Nietzsche’s middle-period writings offer a subtle and searching analysis of his culture, more rewarding than the strident and often-controversial later works. The book also assesses Nietzsche’s claim to be continuing the Enlightenment and shows that he valued reason, evidence, and fact, without which his historical case against Christianity would make no sense.Paperback224 pages | 26 halftonesReaktion Books, 20225 x 7.75 inchesISBN 9781789146066Theory

Friedrich Nietzsche

By Benjamin Balint Winner of the 2020 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature"Dramatic and illuminating…[R]aises momentous questions about nationality, religion, literature, and even the Holocaust."―Adam Kirsch, The Atlantic When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfill Kafka’s last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka’s work, rescuing his legacy from both obscurity and physical destruction. Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership: the Jewish state, where Kafka dreamed of living, or Germany, where Kafka’s three sisters perished in the Holocaust? Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts―brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political―that determined the fate of Kafka’s manuscripts. Paperback288 pagesW.W. Norton & Company, 20195.6 x 0.7 x 8.3 inchesISBN 9780393357387Biography

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