Biography

By Charles Darwent “A meticulously researched, elegantly written, and generously illustrated biography of an artist whose personality was as enigmatic as his art…Darwent deftly characterizes the outsized egos and philosophical and petty rivalries that roiled the Bauhaus…An authoritative and sensitive portrait of a modern master.” ―Kirkus Reviews, starred review“A gripping biography of a German artist unjustly pigeonholed as the creator of interminable variations of pictures of squares…Darwent draws extensively on Albers’s previously unpublished writings and drawings to fully capture the artist’s life…Sympathetic and generously illustrated.”―Publishers Weekly Drawing on extensive unpublished archival writings, documents, and illustrations, this is the first full-scale biography of one of the 20th-century’s great artists. In his accessible study of the “whole” Albers, Charles Darwent combats the fables while telling the fascinating story of an artist, friend, and intellectual. Among Albers’s unpublished papers are letters from friends John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, and Eva Hesse, as well as fans and collectors ranging from the composer Virgil Thomson to the cartoonist Saul Steinberg. If his network of influence was surprisingly wide, so too, were his interests. He started life at the Bauhaus as a glass-maker and went on to create fonts, to run their famous wallpaper workshop, and to make furniture whose designs are still in production eighty years later. He pioneered the study of color at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and chaired the design department at Yale University. While books have been written about Albers for specialist audiences, this new volume fulfills the clear need for a more general study. Hardcover400 pagesThames & Hudson, 20186.8 x 1.5 x 9.8 inchesISBN 9780500519103Artist Monographs, Art History, Biography

Josef Albers: Life and Work

By Stefan ZweigTranslated by Eden and Cedar Paul "Certainly no one can arise unmoved from the reading of this powerful work."—The New Republic"Stefan Zweig’s remarkable study of Marie Antoinette; A full-bodied biography which bids fair to be the definitive life of that tragic queen."—The New York Times"The most influential biography of Marie Antoinette."—The Guardian Stefan Zweig based his biography of Marie Antoinette, who became the Queen of France at the age of fifteen, on the correspondence between her and her mother, and her great love the Count Axel von Fersen. Zweig analyzes the chemistry of a woman's soul from her intimate pleasures to her public suffering as a Queen under the weight of misfortune and history. Zweig describes Marie Antoinette in the King's bedroom, in the enchanted and extravagant world of the Trianon, and with her children. And in his account of 'The Revolution', he describes her resolve during the failed escape to Varennes, her imprisonment in the Conciergerie and her final tragic destiny under the guillotine. Zweig's account has been the definitive biography of Marie Antoinette since its publication, inspiring Antonia Fraser and the recent film adaptation. Paperback592 pagesPushkin Press, 2017Originally published in 19325.1 x 1.5 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9781906548308Literature, Biography, History

Marie Antoinette

By Richard H. King German-Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75) fled from the Nazis to New York in 1941, and during the next thirty years in America she wrote her best-known and most influential works, such as The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and On Revolution. Yet, despite the fact that a substantial portion of her oeuvre was written in America, not Europe, no one has directly considered the influence of America on her thought—until now. In Arendt and America, historian Richard H. King argues that while all of Arendt’s work was haunted by her experience of totalitarianism, it was only in her adopted homeland that she was able to formulate the idea of the modern republic as an alternative to totalitarian rule. Situating Arendt within the context of U.S. intellectual, political, and social history, King reveals how Arendt developed a fascination with the political thought of the Founding Fathers. King also re-creates her intellectual exchanges with American friends and colleagues, such as Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, and shows how her lively correspondence with sociologist David Riesman helped her understand modern American culture and society. In the last section of Arendt and America, King sets out the context in which the Eichmann controversy took place and follows the debate about “the banality of evil” that has continued ever since. As King shows, Arendt’s work, regardless of focus, was shaped by postwar American thought, culture, and politics, including the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War.For Arendt, the United States was much more than a refuge from Nazi Germany; it was a stimulus to rethink the political, ethical, and historical traditions of human culture. This authoritative combination of intellectual history and biography offers a unique approach for thinking about the influence of America on Arendt’s ideas and also the effect of her ideas on American thought. Hardcover416 pagesUniversity of Chicago Press, 20156 x 1.6 x 9 inchesISBN 9780226311494Philosophy, Biography

Arendt and America

By Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Winner of the 1983 Alfred Harcourt Prize Award for Biography and Memoirs“Both a personal and an intellectual biography...It represents biography at its best.”—Peter Berger, front page, The New York Times Book Review“A story of surprising drama...At last, we can see Arendt whole.”—Jim Miller, Newsweek“Indispensable to anyone interested in the life, the thought, or...the example of Hannah Arendt.”—Mark Feeney, Boston Globe This highly acclaimed, prize-winning biography of one of the foremost political philosophers of the twentieth century is here reissued in a trade paperback edition for a new generation of readers. In a new preface the author offers an account of writings by and about Arendt that have appeared since the book’s 1982 publication, providing a reassessment of her subject’s life and achievement. Paperback620 pagesYale University Press, 20046.2 x 1 x 7.2 inchesISBN 9780300105889Biography, Philosophy

Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Second Edition

By Hilde Spiel Translated by Christine Shuttleworth “In capturing the fascination of Fanny von Arnstein, Hilde Spiel provides both a finely drawn portrait of a defining figure of her era and also of the times themselves. The appearance of this excellent English translation could not be more appropriate.”—John Kornblum, former U.S. Ambassador to Germany and to the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe“ ‘The congress danced’ became an enduring comment on the great victors’ conference that apportioned spoils of Napoleon’s defeat at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Some of the most piquant political and cultural cotillions of that fateful gala took place in the salon of Fanny von Arnstein, the Jewish baroness whose life and times Hilde Spiel has conjured brilliantly in this book.”—Frederic Morton, author of A Nervous Splendor, Thunder at Twilight and The Rothschilds“Vienna is the true subject of this fascinating biography…Fanny von Arnstein is a tract for our times.”—The Spectator Berlin-born Fanny von Arnstein married a financier to the Austro-Hungarian imperial court, and in 1798 her husband became the first unconverted Jew in Austria to be granted the title of baron. Soon Fanny hosted an ever more splendid salon which attracted the leading figures of her day, including Madame de Staël and Arthur Schopenhauer. Hilde Spiel's biography provides a vivid portrait of a brave and passionate woman, illuminating a central era in European cultural and social history. Paperback371 pagesNew Vessel Press, 20136.1 x 0.9 x 9 inchesISBN 9781939931030Biography, Austrian History

Fanny von Arnstein: Daughter of the Enlightenment

By Patrick Rössler “Shining a new light on the life and work of Herbert Bayer, this insightful book makes a vital contribution to our understanding of modernism and the 20th century events that shaped its practitioners, and how this extraordinary designer navigated those complex times.” ―Robin Schuldenfrei, Reader in 20th Century Modernism, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, UK“Extensively researched, Rössler's lively text analyzes Bayer's artistic, personal, and political journey from the Bauhaus to the US and hits issues head on-addressing difficult questions regarding history, emigration, politics, and biography” ―Gwen F. Chanzit, Curator Emerita, Denver Art Museum, and Professor Emerita, University of Denver, USA“Gorgeously illustrated and rigorously researched, this book lays bare the crucial missing decade in the life and work of this innovative, influential, and often misunderstood artist. Patrick Rössler's engaging and unflinching account is a must read for anyone interested in design history and the contradictions of creative life in Nazi Berlin.” ―Elizabeth Otto, Professor of Modern & Contemporary Art History, the University at Buffalo (SUNY), USAHerbert Bayer was one of the most extraordinary artists associated with the Bauhaus school. A true multimedia artist, he united graphic design, art, and architecture in a unique style that came to represent the bold aesthetic approach of the movement. A teacher with the school until 1928, Bayer went on to become a highly successful graphic designer in Germany, and later one of the most prominent figures in the 20th-century art scene of the United States.This broad biographical account, which presents previously unseen archival photographs and episodes from the life of Bayer and other influential Bauhaus artists such as Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy, follows Bayer through the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany and finally to his exile in the United States. Specifically, Patrick Rössler reveals for the first time Bayer's unique experience of 1930s Germany, where, with his commercial and artistic life shattered by terror and censorship, he distracted himself with leading a hedonistic life. Shining a light on Bayer's time in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, and his route out of the Nazi state, Rössler provides rich new insights into how Bauhaus artists navigated a protracted period of social upheaval and dictatorship, where commercial success was fraught with a deep hostility towards the regime and the temptations of emigration.Revealing the tensions of an avant-garde artist struggling to practice during a period of repression, Herbert Bayer, Graphic Designer speaks to both the memory of those who left Nazi Germany, but also the perseverance of artists and intellectuals throughout history who have worked under authoritarian regimes. Drawing on never before interpreted documents, letters and archival material, Rössler tells Bayer's compelling story – documenting the life of a unique artist and offering a valuable contribution to research in émigré experiences. Hardcover336 pages; 32 color, 100 black-and-white imagesBloomsbury Visual Arts, 20246.45 x 1 x 9.5 inchesISBN 9781350229679 Graphic Design, Biography

Herbert Bayer, Graphic Designer: From the Bauhaus to Berlin, 1921–1938

Von Margret Greiner Vom Modell der Wiener Moderne zur erfolgreichen New Yorker Galeristin: Die Romanbiografie einer außergewöhnlichen Frau im 20. Jahrhundert, illustriert mit Bildern und historischen Fotografien. Hardcover304 pagesText in German Verlag Kremayr & Scheriau, 20195.5 x 1 x 8.7 inches ISBN 9783218011853 Art History, Biography

Ich will unsterblich werden!: Friederike Beer-Monti und ihre Maler

By Laurie LawlorIllustrated by Becca StadtlanderStrings quivered. Notes shimmered. Meet best friends acclaimed composer Ludwig van Beethoven and bold female entrepreneur Nannette Streicher in this lively and lyrical nonfiction picture book.In a tall, narrow building on a wide avenuepianos plinked and plunked day and night.Everyone in quiet Augsburg knew the Stein home.What music!In 1787, aspiring yet unknown composer Ludwig van Beethoven arrives at young Nannette Stein’s home. What follows is a decades-long friendship that persists whether life hits a low or high note. Acclaimed nonfiction writer Laurie Lawlor deftly depicts how these two fascinating friends—a composer with hearing loss and a woman who became an innovative piano maker in a time that discouraged female entrepreneurship—fought the odds and worked together in perfect harmony. Hardcover40 pages Age range: 6-9Holiday House, 20248.33 x 0.34 x 10.27 inchesISBN 9780823451432 Children's Books, Biography

What Music!: The Fifty-year Friendship between Beethoven and Nannette Streicher, Who Built His Pianos

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 Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings “[An] outstanding and monumental biography of Walter Benjamin….In the thoroughness of their account and the acuity and delicacy of their philosophical analyses, Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings have provided an indispensable sighting of Benjamin’s achievement.”—Anthony Phelan, The Times Literary Supplement“[This] is a careful synthesis of all the available sources for Benjamin’s life—letters, diaries, reminiscences of friends—with all of his major writings, to produce the comprehensive account that has been sorely lacking until now….Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life makes clear how intimately Benjamin’s biography was shaped by the history of Europe during his lifetime.”—Adam Kirsch, The New York Review of Books Walter Benjamin is one of the twentieth century's most important intellectuals, and also one of its most elusive. His writings—mosaics incorporating philosophy, literary criticism, Marxist analysis, and a syncretistic theology—defy simple categorization. And his mobile, often improvised existence has proven irresistible to mythologizers. His writing career moved from the brilliant esotericism of his early writings through his emergence as a central voice in Weimar culture and on to the exile years, with its pioneering studies of modern media and the rise of urban commodity capitalism in Paris. That career was played out amid some of the most catastrophic decades of modern European history: the horror of the First World War, the turbulence of the Weimar Republic, and the lengthening shadow of fascism. Now, a major new biography from two of the world's foremost Benjamin scholars reaches beyond the mosaic and the mythical to present this intriguing figure in full.Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings make available for the first time a rich store of information which augments and corrects the record of an extraordinary life. They offer a comprehensive portrait of Benjamin and his times as well as extensive commentaries on his major works, including "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," the essays on Baudelaire, and the great study of the German Trauerspiel. Sure to become the standard reference biography of this seminal thinker, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life will prove a source of inexhaustible interest for Benjamin scholars and novices alike. Paperback768 pagesBelknap Press, 20162.2 x 6.5 x 9.5 inchesISBN 9780674970779Biography, Philosophy

Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life

By Beatrice Hanssen Long considered to be an impenetrable, hermetic treatise, Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama has rarely received the attention it deserves as a key text, central to a full understanding of his work. In this critically acclaimed study, distinguished Benjamin scholar Beatrice Hanssen unlocks the philosophical and ethical dimensions of his thought with great clarity and sophistication. Paperback202 pages6 x 0.6 x 8.8 inchesUniversity of California Press (December 4, 2000)ISBN 9780520226845

Walter Benjamin's Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels

Edited by Christopher HaileyContributions by Antony Beaumont, Leon Botstein, Regina Busch, Nicholas Chadwick, Mark DeVoto, Douglas Jarman, Sherry Lee, and Margaret Notley "Hailey's introductory chapter is remarkable for the amount of evocative and trenchant detail he has managed to offer in a small space; it may well be the best writing about this milieu since Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siecle Vienna thirty years ago. . . . It is an unexpected delight that a real portrait emerges in this volume."—William R. Braun, Opera News"[This collection] should be welcomed . . . as one of the most important and perceptive books on Berg to appear for many years."—Nicholas Baragwanath, Music and Letters"These translations alone make this a valuable contribution to our understanding of Berg the man as well as to Berg the composer."—Contemporary Review Alban Berg and His World is a collection of essays and source material that repositions Berg as the pivotal figure of Viennese musical modernism. His allegiance to the austere rigor of Arnold Schoenberg's musical revolution was balanced by a lifelong devotion to the warm sensuousness of Viennese musical tradition and a love of lyric utterance, the emotional intensity of opera, and the expressive nuance of late-Romantic tonal practice. The essays in this collection explore the specific qualities of Berg's brand of musical modernism, and present newly translated letters and documents that illuminate his relationship to the politics and culture of his era. Of particular significance are the first translations of Berg's newly discovered stage work Night (Nocturne), Hermann Watznauer's intimate account of Berg's early years, and the famous memorial issue of the music periodical 23. Contributors consider Berg's fascination with palindromes and mirror images and their relationship to notions of time and identity; the Viennese roots of his distinctive orchestral style; his links to such Viennese contemporaries as Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Schreker, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold; and his attempts to maneuver through the perilous shoals of gender, race, and fascist politics. Paperback392 pagesPrinceton University Press, 2010 6 x 1 x 9 inchesISBN 9780691148564Music, Biography, Vienna, Essays

Alban Berg and His World

By Mel Gordon The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber is the first contemporary biography of a notorious actor/dancer/poet/playwright who scandalized sex-obsessed Weimar Berlin during the 1920s. In an era where everything was permitted, Anita Berber‘s celebrations of “Depravity, Horror and Ecstasy” were condemned and censored. She often haunted Weimar Berlin’s hotel lobbies, nightclubs and casinos, radiantly naked except for an elegant sable wrap, a pet monkey hanging from her neck, and a silver brooch packed with cocaine. Multi-talented Anita saw no boundaries between her personal life and her taboo-shattering performances. As such, she was Europe’s first postmodern woman. Among those Anita Berber claimed as members of her vast sexual harem were Marlene Dietrich, Magnus Hirschfeld (the founder of modern sexology and gay liberation), Klaus Mann, Conrad Veidt, Lawrence Durrell, and the King of Yugoslavia. Berber acted in Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler and starred in the silent epic, Lucifer. Even Leni Riefenstahl credits Berber for inspiring her controversial career. After sated Berliners finally tired of Anita Berber’s libidinous antics, she became a “carrion soul that even the hyenas ignored,” dying in 1928 at the age of 29. The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber chronicles a remarkable career, including over 150 photographs and drawings that recreate Anita’s enduring “Repertoire of the Damned.” Paperback200 pagesFeral House Books, 20067 x 0.5 x 10 inchesISBN 9781932595123Biography, Film, Theater

The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Depravity

Original Price: $15.00 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS By Rudolf H. Bock This is the autobiographical story of a medical doctor, an ophthalmologist who, when the Nazis took over Austria in 1938, was interrupted in his last semester of Medical School in Vienna—four exams short of his M.D.—and forced to flee the country. As the title suggests, the beleaguered author's generally positive attitude toward life, as well as many extraordinary and illuminating incidents, allow him to look back 'gratefully' on his life during that extended period of struggle. His key insight is: there are far more kind and helpful people in the world—Orient as well as Occident—than you may imagine! Paperback125 pagesAriadne Press, 20025.5 x 0.2 x 8.2 inchesISBN 9781572411104Biography, Austrian History

Gratefully Looking Back: A Doctor's Special Journey

Original Price: $20.00 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS By John Fuegi "[An] enormous, fascinating biography."—The New Yorker "One of the most important critical studies of the century."—New York MagazineThe result of twenty-five years of research on three continents, Brecht and Company is a revolutionary portrait of one of the world's greatest theater artists—and the people upon whom he built his reputation. A noted Brecht scholar, John Fuegi traces the evolution of Brecht's parasitic relationships and aggressive ambition through close analysis of diaries, letters, and drafts of the literary works, revealing a man who was personally dazzling, a genius at assembling and directing the plays created in his workshop, but ultimately lacking in literary stamina, for which he depended on his lovers. A landmark study about the life and times of one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century theater, Brecht and Co. will forever change our understanding of Brecht and his oeuvre. Paperback752 pagesGrove Press, 20026.02 x 1.65 x 9.03 inchesISBN 9780802139108Biography

Brecht & Co.: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama

By Elias Canetti Translated by Joachim Neugroschel "His exacting presence honors literature"—George Steiner"Canetti is one of our great imaginers and solitary men of genius"—Iris Murdoch"Canetti is someone who has felt in a profound way the responiblity of words. . . There is no doctrine, but there is a great deal of scorn, urgency, grief, and euphoria. The message of the mind's passions is passion. 'I try to imagine someone saying to Shakespeare, "Relax!"' says Canetti. His work eloquently defends tension, exertion, moral and amoral seriousness."—Susan SontagElias Canetti, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature, is one of the major intellectual figures of the twentieth century. He is a master of many genres, having written both a great novel—Auto-da-Fe—and a great work of social theory—Crowds and Power. But Canetti's genius is perhaps nowhere more evident than in his autobiography. The Torch in My Ear, the second volume of Canetti's memoirs, is above all else the account of his admiration for the first great mentor of his adulthood, the Viennese writer Karl Kraus. The book is also a portrait of Canetti's first wife, Veza. Within the framework of these great passions, Canetti provides an astonishing account of the Vienna and Berlin of the 1920s. The voices of Kraus, Veza, and Canetti's mother are accompanied by those of Brecht, Isaac Babel, George Grosz, and many others. Paperback384 pagesFarrar Straus & Giroux, 19836 x 9 inchesISBN 9780374518042Biography

The Torch in My Ear

By Leonora CarringtonIntroduction by Marina Warner "So vivid is Carrington’s step-by-step descent into madness…it is possible to read Down Below in a single sitting, but emotionally quite difficult… [You] get the distinct impression that for Carrington, reality is malleable." —Carmen Maria Machado, NPR"Her stories are vivid, funny and surprisingly fresh...[they] combine satire with surrealist situations to deftly mock the pomposity of organized religion, sexual repression or the endless forms of bureaucratic hypocrisy and ineptitude... She controls her imagery, amuses us with her tweaking of the bourgeoisie and moves us with her dazzling dreamscapes, all the while firmly maintaining her slightly bemused sang-froid." —Richard Burgin, The New York TimesA stunning work of memoir and an unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness by one of Surrealism’s most compelling figuresIn 1937 Leonora Carrington—later to become one of the twentieth century’s great painters of the weird, the alarming, and the wild—was a nineteen-year-old art student in London, beautiful and unapologetically rebellious. At a dinner party, she met the artist Max Ernst. The two fell in love and soon departed to live and paint together in a farmhouse in Provence. In 1940, the invading German army arrested Ernst and sent him to a concentration camp. Carrington suffered a psychotic break. She wept for hours. Her stomach became “the mirror of the earth”—of all worlds in a hostile universe—and she tried to purify the evil by compulsively vomiting. As the Germans neared the south of France, a friend persuaded Carrington to flee to Spain. Facing the approach “of robots, of thoughtless, fleshless beings,” she packed a suitcase that bore on a brass plate the word Revelation.This was only the beginning of a journey into madness that was to end with Carrington confined in a mental institution, overwhelmed not only by her own terrible imaginings but by her doctor’s sadistic course of treatment. In Down Below she describes her ordeal—in which the agonizing and the marvelous were equally combined—with a startling, almost impersonal precision and without a trace of self-pity. Like Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Down Below brings the hallucinatory logic of madness home.Paperback112 PagesNYRB Classics, 20175 x 0.3 x 8 inches ISBN 9781681370606Surrealism, Memoir

Down Below

By Maria Riva "Gossipy, elaborately detailed, and greatly entertaining. Riva leaves no sequin unturned."—The New York Times"Riva has a remarkable good eye. [Her book] completes the portrait of Marlene Dietrich."—The Baltimore Sun"Entertaining. The Dietrich image remains fabulous."—The Independent, London"Dietrich has remained, in the public mind, an alluring legend. What remains when the myth is stripped away? Dietrich wanted her daughter to write her biography. [It is] the only biography to rely on her diaries and letters."—PeopleThe 25th anniversary edition of the landmark biography that tells the full-scale, riveting, and untold story of Marlene Dietrich. Wildly entertaining, Maria Riva reveals the rich life of her mother in vivid detail, evoking Dietrich the woman, her legendary career, and her world. Opening with Dietrich's childhood in Berlin, we meet an energetic, disciplined, and ambitious young actress, whose own mother equated the stage with a world of vagabonds and thieves.Dietrich would quickly rise to stardom on the Berlin stage in the 1920s with her sharp wit and bisexuality—wearing the top hat and tails that revolutionized our concept of beauty and femininity. She would play vulgar roles but maintain her elegance; startle the world but still maintain the aloofness of an aristocrat.As Riva herself remembers, "At age three, I knew quite definitely that I didn't have a mother, I belonged to a queen." Marlene Dietrich comes alive in these pages in all of her incarnations: as muse, artistic collaborator, bonafide movie star, box-office poison, lover, wife, and mother.Dietrich would stand up to the Nazis and galvanize American troops, eventually earning the Congressional Medal of Freedom. There were rich artistic relationships with Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel, Morocco, Shanghai Express), Colette, Erich Maria Remarque, Noel Coward, and Cole Porter, and her heady romances. In her final years, she would make herself visibly invisible, devoting herself to the immortality of her legend.Maria Riva's biography of her mother has the depth, range, and resonance of a novel and captures the conviction and passion of its remarkable subject.Hardcover794 pagesPegasus Books, 20176.4 x 2 x 9.3 inchesISBN 9781681775029Biography, Film

Marlene Dietrich: The Life

By Otto DixOtto Dix (1891–1969) is considered one of the true lions of 20th-century art, a man who established himself as an uncompromising artist that refused to temper how he rendered the realities that he witnessed. Dix’s early works often depict the true brutalities of the WWI battlefields and trenches he served in for over three years, as well as the decadent underworld of 1920s Berlin.With the publication of this first of three volumes of an extensive selection of letters, the most comprehensive collection of Otto Dix texts at last comes into print in English. Encompassing well over 1,000 letters, and ranging from friends and family to other artists, collectors, colleagues, critics & biographers, the letters offer a personal portrait of six decades of the 20th century.Dix himself was a controversial figure throughout his life, and while he claimed never to write self-testimonials, the artist had much to say about the widest range of subjects in his private correspondence. Therein, we discover much about a figure who exhibited a gruff, often abrasive persona to many, a man who depicted war with unrepentant brutality yet who could at the same time pen the most romantic, schmaltzy letters to his wife and sketch amusing caricatures to his daughter.Following his experiences throughout WWI, Dix immediately took up with the dadaists in Dresden in 1919 and became an established figure as part of the Sezession. A few years later, after his first portrait commission in Dusseldorf in 1922, Dix met his future wife, Martha, with whom he would go on to raise three children, and who is one of the principle correspondents in this volume of letters. Some of his most significant work was produced in the 1920s, including his powerful Krieg (War) portfolio, for which the Nazis branded him a “degenerate artist” and forced him to resign his professorship in 1933. Condemned to internal exile, Dix thereafter resided in Hemmenhofen, in the extreme southwest part of Germany. Twelve years later, he would suffer further indignities from the Nazis when ordered to join the Volkssturm in 1945. Dix ended up in a prisoner-of-war camp, again a survivor of a second harrowing cataclysm. After his release, from 1946 onwards, the painter lived between East and West Germany, never truly at home in either ideologically, yet he remained prolific, continuing to produce art until the end of his life, having lived through two World Wars as well as the “Cold War.”​This first volume covers the period 1904–1927 and the heart of it is a selection of Dix’s postcards from the WWI front written to his school friend in Dresden, Helene Jakob, a form of artistic reportage of uncanny power. Recipient of the Die schönsten Deutschen Bücher shortlist in 2014, Dix’s letters will prove to be of considerable interest to art historians, scholars of Expressionism, and aficionados of Dix, all of whom will encounter the artist as never before.Hardcover284 pages Contra Mundum Press, 20165.98 x 0.75 x 9.02 inchesISBN 9781940625188History, Literary Letters

Letters, Vol. 1 (Otto Dix)

By Irene Gammel "Irene Gammel's Baroness Elsa mounts an enthusiastic case for her as one of the great unsung modernists."—Village Voice"The Baroness could not have asked for a more thoughtful and engaged monument than Gammel's book."—The New York Times Book Review Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) is considered by many to be the first American dadaist as well as the mother of dada. An innovator in poetic form and an early creator of junk sculpture, "the Baroness" was best known for her sexually charged, often controversial performances. Some thought her merely crazed, others thought her a genius. The editor Margaret Anderson called her "perhaps the only figure of our generation who deserves the epithet extraordinary." Yet despite her great notoriety and influence, until recently her story and work have been little known outside the circle of modernist scholars. In Baroness Elsa, Irene Gammel traces the extraordinary life and work of this daring woman, viewing her in the context of female dada and the historical battles fought by women in the early twentieth century. Striding through the streets of Berlin, Munich, New York, and Paris wearing such adornments as a tomato-soup can bra, teaspoon earrings, and black lipstick, the Baroness erased the boundaries between life and art, between the everyday and the outrageous, between the creative and the dangerous. Her art objects were precursors to dada objects of the teens and twenties, her sound and visual poetry were far more daring than those of the male modernists of her time, and her performances prefigured feminist body art and performance art by nearly half a century. Paperback562 pagesThe MIT Press, 20037 x 1.3 x 9 inchesISBN 9780262572156Dada

Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity

By Rene Steinke “Steinke shows palpable admiration and respect for her proto-feminist protagonist. This is an intelligent, spirited work that stimulates interest in the baroness’s work and times.”—Publishers Weekly“Steinke has drawn a fully realized character whose Dadaist impulses, even though the filter of time and fiction, still startle.”—Chicago TribuneNo one in 1917 New York had ever encountered a woman like the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven—poet, artist, proto-punk rocker, sexual libertine, fashion avatar, and unrepentant troublemaker. When she wasn't stalking the streets of Greenwich Village wearing a brassiere made from tomato cans, she was enthusiastically declaiming her poems to sailors in beer halls or posing nude for Man Ray or Marcel Duchamp. In an era of brutal war, technological innovation, and cataclysmic change, the Baroness had resolved to create her own destiny—taking the center of the Dadaist circle, breaking every bond of female propriety...and transforming herself into a living, breathing work of art. Paperback 384 pages Harper Collins, 20055 x 8 inches ISBN 9780060778019Biography, Women Artists, Dada

Holy Skirts: A Novel of a Flamboyant Woman Who Risked All for Art

Original Price: $29.95 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS By Michael D. GordinIn the spring of 1911, Albert Einstein moved with his wife and two sons to Prague, the capital of Bohemia, where he accepted a post as a professor of theoretical physics. Though he intended to make Prague his home, he lived there for just sixteen months, an interlude that his biographies typically dismiss as a brief and inconsequential episode. Einstein in Bohemia is a spellbinding portrait of the city that touched Einstein’s life in unexpected ways—and of the gifted young scientist who left his mark on the science, literature, and politics of Prague.Michael Gordin’s narrative is a masterfully crafted account of a person encountering a particular place at a specific moment in time. Despite being heir to almost a millennium of history, Einstein’s Prague was a relatively marginal city within the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yet Prague, its history, and its multifaceted culture changed the trajectories of Einstein’s personal and scientific life. It was here that his marriage unraveled, where he first began thinking seriously about his Jewish identity, and where he embarked on the project of general relativity. Prague was also where he formed lasting friendships with novelist Max Brod, Zionist intellectual Hugo Bergmann, physicist Philipp Frank, and other important figures.Einstein in Bohemia sheds light on this transformative period of Einstein’s life and career, and brings vividly to life a beguiling city in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.Hardcover360 pagesPrinceton University Press, 20205.5 x 8.5 inchesISBN 9780691177373Biography, Bohemia

Einstein in Bohemia

By Franz Michael Felder The inspiring, meditative classic autobiography of a pioneering nineteenth-century autodidact and writer, in English for the first timeOver the 29 years of his short life, Franz Michael Felder worked with furious productivity to better himself and the lives of those around him. From his humble origins in the Austrian village of Schoppernau, he went on to found workers’ cooperatives, a political party and even a public library in his own home, as well as writing many literary works.A Life in the Making is both the culmination of this extraordinary career and a chronicle of its development. It is a story of early hardship and fortitude, of Felder’s relentless zeal for learning and his lifelong effort to reconcile his own expanding horizons with the enforced confines of the community he was born to. Unfolding in prose of limpid beauty, A Life in the Making becomes a deeply moving tribute to Felder’s wife Nanni, and to his enduring belief in the possibility of a better world.Paperback320 pagesPushkin Press, 20215.11 x 0.89 x 7.77 inchesISBN 9781782276852 Autobiography, Austrian History

A Life in the Making

By Andreas PlatthausEr prägte das von Walter Gropius gegründete Bauhaus, dem er als einziger Meister vom ersten bis zum letzten Tag angehörte – von 1919 bis zur Auflösung durch die Nationalsozialisten 1933 –, wie kaum ein Zweiter. Mit seinen Freunden Paul Klee und Wassily Kandinsky revolutionierte er die Kunst. Später wurde er so populär und von der Alltagskultur eingemeindet, dass man Bilder von ihm als Plakate bei einem großen schwedischen Möbelhaus kaufen konnte: Lyonel Feininger. 1871 in New York geboren, hielt er sich von seinem siebzehnten Lebensjahr an fast ein halbes Jahrhundert lang in Deutschland auf. Den Großteil dieser Zeit verbrachte er in Berlin, wo sich auch die rätselhaftesten Episoden seines Lebens abspielten. Warum blieb er, obwohl als "feindlicher Ausländer" registriert, während des Ersten Weltkriegs? Und warum verließ er, obwohl mit einer Jüdin verheiratet und Vater dreier Söhne, Nazi-Deutschland erst 1937? In der Persönlichkeit des Malers spiegelt sich das Dilemma einer doppelten Exil-Existenz im 20. Jahrhundert.Andreas Platthaus, der für dieses Buch zahlreiche Archivbestände auswerten konnte, erzählt das Leben eines Mannes, der sich im steten Zwiespalt zwischen amerikanischem und deutschem Selbstverständnis befand.Hardcover448 pagesText in GermanRowohlt Berlinm, 20215.7 x 8.6 inchesISBN 9783737101165Biography

Lyonel Feininger - Porträt eines Lebens

Von Margret GreinerEmilie Flöge lernte als junges Mädchen Gustav Klimt kennen und führte mit ihm ein Leben lang eine Beziehung jenseits aller Konventionen. Vor allem aber war sie eine herausragende Modeschöpferin. Im Wien um 1900, wo Malerei, Architektur, Kunsthandwerk und Mode eine Blütezeit erlebten, schuf Emilie Flöge einen bahnbrechenden Mode-Stil, der die Frauen – fünfzehn Jahre vor Coco Chanel – von Korsett und Mieder befreite. Paperback303 SeitanKremayr & Scheriau, 20164.65 x 0.94 x 7.36 inchesISBN 9783442714131 Literature

Auf Freiheit zugeschnitten: Emilie Flöge: Modeschöpferin und Gefährtin Gustav Klimts

By Stuart Jeffries “An engaging and accessible history of the lives and main ideas of the leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School.”—The New York Review of Books“This seemingly daunting book turned out to be an exhilarating page-turner . . . Grand Hotel Abyss is an outstanding critical introduction to some of the most fertile, and still relevant, thinkers of the 20th century.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post“Jeffries moves swiftly across the decades, retracing the jagged paths from the official founding of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in June 1924, through its years in exile in New York in the ’30s and Los Angeles in the ’40s and its hasty return to Frankfurt in the early postwar years, up to the work of Horkheimer and Adorno’s prized protégé Jürgen Habermas and the Institute’s legacy today.”—Noah Isenberg, Bookforum Grand Hotel Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to reveal how a group of German thinkers, the Frankfurt School, redefined the twentieth century and our own times. Among the most prominent members of what became the Frankfurt School were the philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. By taking popular culture seriously as an object of study—whether it was film, music, ideas, or consumerism—the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanized society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption. Paperback336 pagesVerso, 20175.1 x 1.3 x 7.6 inchesISBN 9781784785697Biography, Philosophy

Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School

By Patrick Leigh Fermor Introduction by Jan Morris "The finest traveling companion we could ever have...His head is stocked with enough cultural lore and poetic fancy to make every league an adventure."—Christopher Hudson, Evening Standard "The greatest of living travel writers...an amazingly complex and subtle evocation of a place that is no more."—Jan MorrisThis beloved account about an intrepid young Englishman on the first leg of his walk from London to Constantinople is simply one of the best works of travel literature ever written. At the age of eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the heart of London on an epic journey—to walk to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the rich account of his adventures as far as Hungary, after which Between the Woods and the Water continues the story to the Iron Gates that divide the Carpathian and Balkan mountains. Acclaimed for its sweep and intelligence, Leigh Fermor's book explores a remarkable moment in time. Hitler has just come to power but war is still ahead, as he walks through a Europe soon to be forever changed—through the Lowlands to Mitteleuropa, to Teutonic and Slav heartlands, through the baroque remains of the Holy Roman Empire; up the Rhine, and down to the Danube.At once a memoir of coming-of-age, an account of a journey, and a dazzling exposition of the English language, A Time of Gifts is also a portrait of a continent already showing ominous signs of the holocaust to come. Paperback344 pagesNYBR Classics, 2005Originally published 1977 5.1 x 8 inchesISBN 9781590171653European Literature, Travel Essays, Autobiography

A Time of Gifts

By Adam Phillips "As a writer, Mr. Phillips specializes in paradoxes and antitheses—almost all of which he puts forth thoughtfully and gracefully...An intelligent and well-written book."—Steven Marcus, The New York Times"A compact intellectual biography...Phillips often illuminatingly reads Freud's thinking against the background of his life circumstances...Probably more than any other psychoanalytically informed writer, Phillips has continued to enrich this mode of thought by literary means, through sheer force of style."—Kenneth Baker, The San Francisco Chronicle"Adam Phillips is, I believe, one of the most engaging writers in the world on analysis and the analytic movement...Phillips’s own love of the beauty and power of psychoanalysis here serves both him and the reader wonderfully well."—Vivian Gornick, The New York Times Book Review From one of the world’s foremost authorities on Sigmund Freud comes a strikingly original biography of the father of psychoanalysisBecoming Freud is the story of the young Freud—Freud up until the age of fifty—that incorporates all of Freud’s many misgivings about the art of biography. Freud invented a psychological treatment that involved the telling and revising of life stories, but he was himself skeptical of the writing of such stories. In this biography, Adam Phillips, whom the New Yorker calls “Britain’s foremost psychoanalytical writer,” emphasizes the largely and inevitably undocumented story of Freud’s earliest years as the oldest—and favored—son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and suggests that the psychoanalysis Freud invented was, among many other things, a psychology of the immigrant—increasingly, of course, everybody’s status in the modern world. Psychoanalysis was also Freud’s way of coming to terms with the fate of the Jews in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So as well as incorporating the writings of Freud and his contemporaries, Becoming Freud also uses the work of historians of the Jews in Europe in this significant period in their lives, a period of unprecedented political freedom and mounting persecution. Phillips concludes by speculating what psychoanalysis might have become if Freud had died in 1906, before the emergence of a psychoanalytic movement over which he had to preside. Hardcover192 pagesYale University Press, 20145.8 x 0.7 x 8.2 inchesISBN 9780300158663Biography, Psychology

Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst

By Élisabeth RoudinescoTranslated by Catherine Porter Original Price: $35.00 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERS “Through seamlessly and eloquently weaving together details from Freud’s time and our own, [Roudinesco] provides a refreshingly new and welcome account—warts and all.”—Janet Sayers, Times Higher Education“What makes Freud: In His Time And Ours…such a captivating read, is the author’s ability to explain what are often complex, deeply-layered, and dark taboo subjects, into a language that is easily understood…[A] brilliant biography.”—J. P. O’Mallery, The Irish Examiner“[Roudinesco] provides an insightful, balanced, and sympathetic portrait of Freud. As she assesses Freud’s revolutionary ideas about rationality, sexuality, and the unconscious, Roudinesco demonstrates that Freud was less a scientific thinker who uncovered universal truths than a product of his time: a genius, to be sure, but very much a bourgeois shaped by society, family, and politics in the late 19th century… Her critique has an especially persuasive force because it is grounded not only in an analysis of Freud’s books, diaries, and letters but from accounts of his sessions with patients.”—Glenn C. Altschuler, Psychology Today Élisabeth Roudinesco offers a bold and modern reinterpretation of the iconic founder of psychoanalysis. Based on new archival sources, this is Freud’s biography for the twenty-first century—a critical appraisal, at once sympathetic and impartial, of a genius greatly admired and yet greatly misunderstood in his own time and in ours.Roudinesco traces Freud’s life from his upbringing as the eldest of eight siblings in a prosperous Jewish-Austrian household to his final days in London, a refugee of the Nazis’ annexation of his homeland. She recreates the milieu of fin de siècle Vienna in the waning days of the Habsburg Empire—an era of extraordinary artistic innovation, given luster by such luminaries as Gustav Klimt, Stefan Zweig, and Gustav Mahler. In the midst of it all, at the modest residence of Berggasse 19, Freud pursued his clinical investigation of nervous disorders, blazing a path into the unplumbed recesses of human consciousness and desire.Yet this revolutionary who was overthrowing cherished notions of human rationality and sexuality was, in his politics and personal habits, in many ways conservative, Roudinesco shows. In his chauvinistic attitudes toward women, and in his stubborn refusal to acknowledge the growing threat of Hitler until it was nearly too late, even the analytically-minded Freud had his blind spots. Alert to his intellectual complexity—the numerous tensions in his character and thought that remained unresolved—Roudinesco ultimately views Freud less as a scientific thinker than as the master interpreter of civilization and culture. Hardcover592 pagesHarvard University Press, 20166.2 x 9.25 inchesISBN 9780674659568Biography, Psychology

Freud: In His Time and Ours

By Peter Gay "Brilliant.…A dazzling performance.…Gay's ability to integrate into a coherent whole the vast published and unpublished literature on Freud including hundreds of previously unknown or inaccessible letters is awesome.…A work of art."—Jonathan Sharp, San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle"Intelligent and wholly absorbing.…Judicious, original biography, scrupulously grounded in close readings of [Freud's] work."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times"Elegant…puts Freud's life into the context of his time while attempting to explain him for readers who cannot escape his shadow. In Gay's hands, the Olympian figure is almost within mortal reach."—Michael Skube, Raleigh News and Observer A New York Times bestseller, this is the most highly regarded biography of Freud ever written. To read this book is to enter the world of Sigmund Freud as never before: his family, his city, his professional struggles, his long fruitful and embattled life. Drawing on a vast store of unpublished documents, including hundreds of hitherto unknown or inaccessible letters, Peter Gay deals frankly with the controversies that have long swirled around Freud's impassioned friendships, his love life, and his theoretical innovations which, as Freud himself put it, agitated the sleep of mankind. Paperback864 pagesW.W. Norton & Co., 20066.2 x 1.6 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9780393328615Biography, Psychology

Freud: A Life For Our Time

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

By Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-SaloméEdited by Ernst PfeifferTranslated by William Robson-Scott and Elaine Robson-Scott Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) was a writer and disciple of Freud who became a practicing analyst. For over two decades she and Freud kept up an intensive correspondence. Freud found in her a perceptive appreciator and amplifier of his ideas, and Frau Andreas found him a sympathetic critic of her own. Their exchanges on theoretical topics and clinical experiences, their admiring friendship, and the glimpses of their personalities makes this collection invaluable for readers interested in the history of psychoanalysis. Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote her first letter to Freud in 1912, asking his permission to come to Vienna for psychoanalytical training. This extraordinary Russian woman, whose intelligence and beauty captivated Nietzsche and Rilke, now captivated Freud, while she discovered in Freud's psychoanalysis the true fulfillment of her life. Freud's letters contain revealing commentaries on his working methods, his conception of narcissism, and his interpretation of Moses, and they treat the themes that preoccupied him in old age: death, religion, war. Frau Andreas's topics include her relationship to Rilke, and her reaction to his death, and the psychology of the artist. The book includes an introduction and notes by Ernst Pfeiffer, Lou Andreas-Salomé's literary executor. Paperback264 pagesW. W. Norton & Company, 19855.3 x 0.6 x 7.8 inchesISBN 9780393302615Biography, Psychology

Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé: Letters

By Peter Gay “Not a single paragraph is superfluous. His inquiry rivets without let up, powered by its unremitting candor.”—Frederic Morton, Los Angeles Times Book Review“[Gay’s] writing is smooth, a sound historian’s instrument…Gay’s story could hardly be anything other than interesting, and one is glad about the happy outcome of his family’s afflictions and his own feeling that his gift has been ‘an astonishing gift.’”—Frank Kermode, The New York Times Book Review"Peter Gay’s account of his boyhood in Nazi Germany is written with the sensitivity for hidden meanings and implications one would expect of him. . . . It is becoming ever more difficult to recapture the dire atmosphere of the 1930s, and the analytical abstractions of present-day historiography are sometimes deficient in realism. Gay’s book provides a valuable antidote."—Edgar Feuchtwanger, Journal of Jewish Studies In this poignant book, a renowned historian tells of his youth as an assimilated, anti-religious Jew in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939—"the story, " says Peter Gay, 'of a poisoning and how I dealt with it.' Gay describes his family, the life they led, and the reasons they did not emigrate sooner, and he explores his own ambivalent feelings—then and now—toward Germany and the Germans. Even before the events of 1938-39, culminating in Kristallnacht, the family was convinced that they must leave the country. Gay describes the bravery and ingenuity of his father in working out the agonizing emigration process, the courage of the non-Jewish friends who helped his family during their last bitter months in Germany, and the family's mounting panic as they witnessed the indifference of other countries to their plight and that of others like themselves. Gay's account—marked by candor, modesty, and insight—adds an important and curiously neglected perspective to the history of German Jewry. Paperback208 pagesYale University Press, 19999.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 inchesISBN 9780300080704Autobiographical, Memoir, German History

My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin

By Alice Herdan-ZuckmayerTranslated by Ida H. Washington and Carol E. WashingtonIntroduction by Elisa Albert “These literate glimpses of rural America make good stand-alone chapter reads: raising chickens, meeting reticent New England neighbors, marveling at the mysterious USDA pamphlets or the Sears, Roebuck catalog, journeying to the Dartmouth library, etc…This volume will be of special regional and historical interest as well as of general interest in public libraries where anecdotal essays are popular.”—Booklist“The Zuckmayers’ courage and strength is an inspiration to all who may be set in unfamiliar surroundings, even in their own country.”—Publishers Weekly“The book offers readers an interesting historical perspective of Vermont during the war years, as well as an inspiring narrative on the indomitable human instinct to survive….The contemporary reader will come away feeling inspired by the Zuckmayers’ perseverance and with renewed gratitude for all of the amenities (like heat) which we now take for granted.”—Jennifer Falvey, Vermont Standard Alice and Carl Zuckmayer lived at the center of Weimar era Berlin. She was a former actor turned medical student, he was a playwright, and their circle of friends included Stefan Zweig, Alma Mahler, and Bertolt Brecht. But then the Nazis took over and Carl’s most recent success, a play satirizing German militarism, impressed them in all the wrong ways. The couple and their two daughters were forced to flee, first to Austria, then to Switzerland, and finally to the United States. Los Angeles didn’t suit them, neither did New York, but a chance stroll in the Vermont woods led them to Backwoods Farm and the eighteenth-century farmhouse where they would spend the next five years. In Europe, the Zuckmayers were accustomed to servants; in Vermont, they found themselves building chicken coops, refereeing fights between fractious ducks, and caring for temperamental water pipes “like babies.” But in spite of the endless work and the brutal, depressing winters, Alice found that in America she had at last discovered her “native land.” This generous, surprising, and witty memoir, a best seller in postwar Germany, has all the charm of an unlikely romantic comedy. Paperback256 pagesNYRB Classics, 2017Originally published 19495 x 0.6 x 8 inches ISBN 9781681370743Memoir

The Farm in the Green Mountains

By Gunnar DeckerTranslated by Peter Lewis “Top-notch….A masterful, penetrating biography…that deserves the accolade ‘definitive.’…Decker lays bare Hesse’s complex, contradictory personality, his all-consuming dedication to the creative life, his tormented relationships with women, and the cultural and political forces that found their ways into his works….A richly detailed and supremely sensitive portrayal of an artist obsessed with the ‘terrible and magnificent’ act of creation.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review“Shows that Hesse’s life was an uneasy compromise between his spiritual absolutism, which pushed him in the direction of irascible isolation, and his human needs, which encumbered him with wives, children, and houses that he never quite wanted or accepted.”—Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker Against the horrors of Nazi dictatorship and widespread disillusionment with the forces of mass culture and consumerism, Hermann Hesse’s stories inspired nonconformity and a yearning for universal values. Few today would doubt Hesse’s artistry or his importance to millions of devoted readers. But just who was the author of Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and Demian? Gunnar Decker weaves together previously unavailable sources to offer a unique interpretation of the life and work of Hermann Hesse. Drawing on recently discovered correspondence between Hesse and his psychoanalyst, Josef Lang, Decker shows how Hesse reversed the traditional roles of therapist and client, and rethinks the relationship between Hesse’s novels and Jungian psychoanalysis. He also explores Hesse’s correspondence with Stefan Zweig―recently unearthed―to find the source of Hesse’s profound sense of alienation from his contemporaries. Decker’s biography brings to life this icon of spiritual searching and disenchantment who galvanized the counterculture in the 1960s and feels newly relevant today. Hardback800 pagesHarvard University Press, 20186.7 x 1.7 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9780674737884Biography

Hesse: The Wanderer and His Shadow

By Hermann HesseTranslated by Basil Creighton "For all its savagely articulate descriptions of torment and isolation, it is most eloquent about something less glamorous but far more important: healing."—The GuardianWith its blend of Eastern mysticism and Western culture, Hesse’s best-known and most autobiographical work is one of literature’s most poetic evocations of the soul’s journey to liberation.Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically when he meets a woman who is his opposite, the carefree and elusive Hermine. The tale of the Steppenwolf culminates in the surreal Magic Theater—For Madmen Only!Originally published in English in 1929, Steppenwolf ’s wisdom continues to speak to our souls and marks it as a classic of modern literature. Also available in German. Paperback224 pagesPicador Publishing, 2002Originally published in 1927ISBN 9780312278670Autobiographical Fiction

Steppenwolf

By Ronald Hayman "Compelling....Hayman captures...the extraordinary charisma of his subject."—Newsday"Likely to become the standard biography of the revolutionary psychoanalyst."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review"[M]eticulously researched...judicious....intelligently illuminates the private life Jung deliberately veiled in shadow."—The New York Times Book Review Carl Jung was one of the world's most influential psychoanalysts. With the exception of Freud, who chose him as the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, no psychologist has achieved more. Previous biographers have either made Jung an idol or condemned him for his failings. This "rounded, provocative, and revealing portrait of an extraordinary man and his extraordinarily influential ideas" (Washington Post Book World) neither ignores Jung's faults nor exaggerates them in investigating the most crucial paradoxes surrounding this enigmatic figure. "[C]aptur[ing] ... the extraordinary charisma of his subject" (Newsday), Ronald Hayman's impeccably researched work is "all the more effective for its detached tone that perfectly puts in proportion Jung's cruel, brilliant and crazy schemes" (The [London] Times). "Likely to become the standard biography of the revolutionary psychoanalyst" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), A Life of Jung offers a rare insight into how Jung's revolutionary ideas grew out of his own extraordinary experiences. Paperback561 pagesW.W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition, 20025.5 x 1.4 x 8.2 inchesISBN 9780393323221Biography, Psychology

A Life of Jung

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

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 Franz Kafka “In Kafka we have before us the modern mind splendidly trained for the great game of pretending that the world it comprehends in sterilized sobriety is the only and ultimate reality there is—yet a mind living in sin with the soul of Abraham. Thus he knows two things at once, and both with equal assurance: that there is no God, and that there must be a God. It is the perspective of the curse: the intellect dreaming of its dream of absolute freedom, and the soul knowing of its terrible bondage.”—Erich Heller “It is likely that these journals will be regarded as one of [Kafka’s] major literary works; his life and personality were perfectly suited to the diary form, and in these pages he reveals what he customarily hid from the world.”—The New Yorker These diaries cover the years 1910 to 1923, the year before Kafka’s death at the age of forty. They provide a penetrating look into life in Prague and into Kafka’s accounts of his dreams, his feelings for the father he worshipped and the woman he could not bring himself to marry, his sense of guilt, and his feelings of being an outcast. They offer an account of a life of almost unbearable intensity. Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague, where he lived most of his life. During his lifetime, he published only a few short stories, including “The Metamorphosis,” “The Judgment,” and “The Stoker.” He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes. Paperback528 pagesShocken, 2009Originally published in 19485.2 x 1.1 x 8 inchesISBN 9780805209068Diary, Biography

Kafka Diaries, 1910-1923

By Joachim Unseld"We have before us a book that is to be recommended to everyone who wants to gain a nuanced picture of Kafka and the literary world he inhabited."—Süddeutsche Zeitung"It is refreshing. . .to have a work which provides us with new insights as well as new facts."—World Literature TodayFranz Kafka's wishes concerning publication of his works during his lifetime as well as the disposition of his literary estate have long been controversial and have given rise to many misunderstandings and misrepresentations—some attaining an almost folkloric status. The prevalent view of an author who desired to have his works destroyed contradicts the reality shown here of the close, symbiotic relationship between Kafka's private life and his literary ambitions. Particular attention is given to Kafka's relationship to and interactions with his publishers, as Unseld discloses the history of the primary correspondence between Kafka and Ernst Rowohlt, Kurt Wolff, and his friend and tireless advocate, Max Brod. Hardcover393 pagesAriadne Press, 19946 x 1.2 x 9 inchesISBN 9780929497785Biography

Kafka: A Writer's Life

By Pascale CasanovaTranslated by Chris Turner "From Casanova, we get a methodological model of how to excavate historical subjects’ temporal and social location so that we can understand how they comprehend and react to their condition of domination [. . .] Casanova shows how Kafka’s anger became invisible when the specific world in which he wrote, and upon which he commented, disappeared. Only by recovering the political disputes of his time and place can we make sense of the literary “weapons of the weak” that Kafka developed."—Richard Lachmann, Public SeminarFranz Kafka was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His writing contributed greatly to existentialism, and the term “Kafkaesque” is now synonymous with the literature of the surreal, the complex and the illogical. His works sustained themes of violence, family conflict, bizarre and all-powerful bureaucracies, and fantastical transformations. However, in Kafka, Angry Poet, Pascale Casanova looks past the customary analyses of Kafka’s work and dives deep into his mind, examining his motives rather than the results. She bravely asks the question, “What if Kafka were the most radical of social critics? What if he had actually attempted to pull the wool over our eyes with narratives that are, in fact, subtly deceptive?”The hypothesis she develops is that Kafka began with an awareness of the tragic fate of the German-speaking Jews of early twentieth-century Prague and was subsequently led to reflect on other forms of power, such as male dominance and colonial oppression. The stories produced as a result were traps for the unwary, throwing the reader off the scent with the use of unreliable and even deceitful narrators. Curiously, says Casanova, it is not in literature that one finds the answers to these questions but in German ethnology, a field which, as an intellectual of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kafka knew well. Through her detailed research, Casanova shows us a combative Kafka who is at once ethnologist and investigator, unstintingly denouncing all forms of domination with the kind of tireless rage that was his hallmark. In so doing, she sheds light on the deep-seated reasons for Kafka’s anger.Hardcover391 pagesSeagull Books, 20155 x 1.5 x 8 inchesISBN 9780857421623Biography, Literary Criticism

Kafka, Angry Poet

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

Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy [Paperback]

Original Price: $35 UP TO 20% ADDITIONAL SAVINGS FOR MEMBERSBy Reiner Stach The eagerly anticipated final volume of the award-winning, definitive biography of Franz Kafka.How did Kafka become Kafka? This eagerly anticipated third and final volume of Reiner Stach's definitive biography of the writer answers that question with more facts and insight than ever before, describing the complex personal, political, and cultural circumstances that shaped the young Franz Kafka (1883–1924). It tells the story of the years from his birth in Prague to the beginning of his professional and literary career in 1910, taking the reader up to just before the breakthrough that resulted in his first masterpieces, including "The Metamorphosis." Brimming with vivid and often startling details, Stach’s narrative invites readers deep inside this neglected period of Kafka’s life. The book’s richly atmospheric portrait of his German Jewish merchant family and his education, psychological development, and sexual maturation draws on numerous sources, some still unpublished, including family letters, schoolmates’ memoirs, and early diaries of his close friend Max Brod.The biography also provides a colorful panorama of Kafka’s wider world, especially the convoluted politics and culture of Prague. Before World War I, Kafka lived in a society at the threshold of modernity but torn by conflict, and Stach provides poignant details of how the adolescent Kafka witnessed violent outbreaks of anti-Semitism and nationalism. The reader also learns how he developed a passionate interest in new technologies, particularly movies and airplanes, and why another interest―his predilection for the back-to-nature movement―stemmed from his “nervous” surroundings rather than personal eccentricity.The crowning volume to a masterly biography, this is an unmatched account of how a boy who grew up in an old Central European monarchy became a writer who helped create modern literature.Hardcover584 pagesPrinceton University Press, 20166.3 x 1.7 x 9.4 inchesISBN 9780691151984 Biography, Czech Writer

Kafka: The Early Years [Hardcover]

By Reiner StachTranslated by Shelley Frisch Longlisted for the 2014 PEN Translation Award, Pen American CenterWinner of the 2014 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize"[S]cholars and specialists lost and absorbed in the many rooms of the Kafka factory will find much to discuss in the labors of Reiner Stach."—Joy Williams, New York Times Book Review"[Stach's] resplendent Kafka: The Years of Insight, tracking Kafka's final eight years, meditates on the limits of the knowable even as it exhibits unparalleled dedication to the Kafka's life and work."—Gary Giddins, Wall Street Journal"This work is a monumental accomplishment with a first-rate translation by scholar Frisch."—Library Journal This volume of Reiner Stach’s acclaimed and definitive biography of Franz Kafka tells the story of the final years of the writer’s life, from 1916 to 1924—a period during which the world Kafka had known came to an end. Stach’s riveting narrative, which reflects the latest findings about Kafka’s life and works, draws readers in with nearly cinematic precision, zooming in for extreme close-ups of Kafka’s personal life, then pulling back for panoramic shots of a wider world blighted by World War I, disease, and inflation.In these years, Kafka was spared military service at the front, yet his work as a civil servant brought him into chilling proximity with its grim realities. He was witness to unspeakable misery, lost the financial security he had been counting on to lead the life of a writer, and remained captive for years in his hometown of Prague. The outbreak of tuberculosis and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire constituted a double shock for Kafka, and made him agonizingly aware of his increasing rootlessness. He began to pose broader existential questions, and his writing grew terser and more reflective, from the parable-like "Country Doctor" stories and "A Hunger Artist to The Castle".A door seemed to open in the form of a passionate relationship with the Czech journalist Milena Jesenská. But the romance was unfulfilled and Kafka, an incurably ill German Jew with a Czech passport, continued to suffer. However, his predicament only sharpened his perceptiveness, and the final period of his life became the years of insight. Paperback696 pages | 72 halftonesPrinceton University Press; reprint edition, 2015Originally published in 20136 x 9.25 inchesISBN 9780691165844 Biography, Literature Criticism

Kafka: The Years of Insight [Paperback]

By Peter-Andre AltTranslated by Kristine A. Thorsen “Peter-André Alt’s Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son is a splendid conspectus of Kafka’s life and work, admirable for its scope and precision. It is the single best study of Kafka if one wishes to read Kafka’s writings as an imbrication of life experience and literary genius. Alt’s study is a rich, redoubtable mine of information and wisdom arising from the most scrupulous scholarly attention to Kafka’s work, body, and milieu.”—Stanley Corngold, author of Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine "A very welcome translation of excellent scholarship that forces us to question the relationship between an author's life and his work. In this crisp translation of the original, English readers will rediscover the joys of reading Kafka as he has never been presented before."—Richard Block, author of Echoes of a Queer Messianic: From Frankenstein to Brokeback MountainFranz Kafka remains one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His novels, stories, and letters are still regarded today as the epitome of the dark, fascinating, and uncanny, a model of the modernist aesthetic. Peter-André Alt’s landmark biography, Franz Kafka, the Eternal Son, recounts and explores Kafka’s life and literary work throughout the cultural and political upheavals of central Europe.Alt’s biography explores Franz Kafka’s own view of life and writing as a unity that shaped his identity. He locates links and echoes among the author’s work, life, and surroundings, situating him within the traditions of Prague's German literature, modernity, psychoanalysis, and philosophy as well as within its Jewish culture, arts, theater, and intellectual tradition.In this biographical tour de force, Kafka emerges as an observant flaneur and wistful loner, an anxious ascetic, an ecstatic and skeptic, a specialist in terror, and a master of irony. Alt masterfully illuminates Kafka's life not as source material but as a mirror of his literary genius. Paperback696 pagesNorthwestern University Press, 2018 7 x 2.2 x 10 inchesISBN 9780810126077Biography. Literary Critic

Franz Kafka, the Eternal Son: A Biography

By Wilhelm HausensteinForeword by Kenneth Croose Parry "This books is far more than just the story of Paul Klee's development as a painter. It is also the fascinating outcome of the collaboration between a mature artist and his young chronicler, both eager to make names for themselves in 1920."—Pamela Kort The impressions Paul Klee collected on his journey to Tunisia in 1914, and especially to the city of Kairouan, were of fundamental significance to his artistic development: “Color and I are one. I am a painter,” he declared afterwards. A few years later, in 1921, Klee’s friend Wilhelm Hausenstein placed the artist at the center of his book, Kairouan, and was thus one of the first people to recognize the artist’s genius. This edition combines Hausenstein’s rare original text with rich examples of Klee’s most important works. The particular charm of this volume lies in the unique combination of Klee monograph, novel narrating the development of the artist, and an exclusive book presentation. Kairouan is a treasure for established lovers of Klee as well as those whose interest has just been awakened. It grants an incomparable insight into the life of Paul Klee as an artist within the context of European art and society.Hardcover176 pages | 32 color illustrations Hirmer Publishers, 20206 x 8.3 x 0.8 inchesISBN 9783777435572Artist Monograph, Travel

Kairouan: Or How Paul Klee Became a Painter

By Diethard Leopold In the 1950s, as the world continued to recover from war and artists were grappling with new conditions in striking new ways, Rudolf Leopold (1925–2010) achieved something impressive: he built up a large, aesthetically sophisticated and historically relevant art collection of international renown. This book draws on the memories of Leopold’s son, Diethard, to tell Leopold’s story, presenting him as a fascinating collector. It shows how Leopold, beginning his collection around a core of works by Egon Schiele, branched out to collect major works by Klimt, Kokoschka, Gerstl, Egger-Lienz, and Kubin, as well as by German expressionists—thus bringing together a representative grouping of the key artists of the period.Hardcover320 pagesHirmer Publishers, 20186.5 x 1.1 x 9.2 inchesISBN 9783777428673Biography, Art History, Museum Studies

Rudolf Leopold

By Claire Beck Loos Translated by Constance C. Pontasch and Nicholas Saunders "The theatrical nature of Claire Beck Loos’ narrative, her ultimately tragic journey and her artist’s way of encapsulating the essential about Loos in a mixture of camera-sharp observations is mitigated by an affectionate regard for the brilliant, but deeply flawed man that he was. The book is hugely perceptive and beautifully written."—Dr. Irena Murray, Director of the British Architectural Library at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)"Claire wrote the book—first published in 1936—to raise money for the tombstone Loos designed for himself. The book is so very alive with his presence, however, that surely it was a means to keep him close to her. […] In razor-sharp anecdotes, some a paragraph, some several pages, Claire writes in the present tense. The result is altogether Loosian: timeless, with as little ornament, but as much empathy, as any protégé could deliver. Here, theory in the flesh walks in."—Barbara Lamprecht, book review for the Society of Architectural Historians Written by Loos’ third wife, the photographer Claire Beck (1904–1942), these often humorous, short episodes reveal Loos’ temperament and philosophy during the last years of his life (1928–1933). His irreverent personality and attitudes about post-Imperial Viennese society, the role of the craftsman, and the organic beauty of raw materials are brought to light. Included in The Private Adolf Loos are Claire's photographs of Loos, collected in museums, as well as informal snapshots of the two of them showing the whimsy and theatricality of this relationship between two artistic personalities—one as infamous as he was well-regarded, and one, a youthful accomplice and budding photographer who would also become Loos' intermediary, secretary and proxy. With this bricolage of short tales and its dark conclusion at the brink of death’s door, Claire shows herself to be one of Loos’ great champions and memorialists, despite his shortcoming and debilitations. This is not a book about architecture, but rather a love story about the Modern revolution that provides a woman’s insight into one of its most radical personalities, set amid the fascinating cultural backdrop of 1920s and 1930s interwar Europe. Paperback176 pagesDoppelHouse Press, 20208.63 x 1.63 x 10 inchesISBN 9780997003482 Biography, Architecture

The Private Adolf Loos: Portrait of an Eccentric Genius

By James Reidel "A remarkable book, Manon’s World brilliantly evokes an extraordinary set of individuals in an urgent time and place: Austria during and after the First World War. Reidel’s sure hand weaves together the stories of the people surrounding and interacting with Manon. The result is a dazzling narrative that transports us to a lost world peopled by some of the remarkable characters in recent history. A story so compelling it is hard to put down."―Mary Dearborn, biographer and authorManon Gropius (1916–1935) was the daughter of Alma Mahler, the widow of Gustav Mahler, and the architect Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, and the stepdaughter of the writer Franz Werfel. In Manon’s World, James Reidel explores the life and death of a child at the center of a broken love triangle. The story takes a unique course, describing a peripheral figure but in a context where her significance and centrality in the lives of her famous parents and circles comes into relief. Reidel reveals a neglected and fascinating life in a world gone by—Vienna, Venice, and Berlin of the interwar years. Not just a narrative biography, Manon’s World is also a medical history of the polio that killed Manon and a personal cultural history of the aspirations projected on her—and seen as lost by such keen observers as Elias Canetti, who devoted two chapters of his Nobel Prize–winning memoirs to his encounters with Manon and her funeral. That event led Alban Berg to dedicate his signature Violin Concerto “to an angel.” Reidel reveals a more complex image of a young woman who desired to be an actress and artist in her own right despite being her mother’s intended protégé, an inspiration to her father who rarely saw her, and her stepfather Franz Werfel, who obsessively wrote her into his novels, beginning with The Forty Days of Musa Dagh and as a revenant in all the books that followed.Hardcover324 pages | 10 halftonesSeagull Books, 20216 x 9 x 1.2 inchesISBN 9780857427496Biography

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