Fiction

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 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 Steven Guarnaccia Discover all the many ways that nothing is really something! This mind-bendingly clever picture book about a visit to the Museum of Nothing will have curious readers marveling and laughing along. There is so much more to nothing than you think! Join Oona and Otto on a tour of the funny, fascinating Museum of Nothing in this imaginative read-aloud from noted designer Guarnaccia. This museum proudly displays every kind of nothing. There’s the Hall of Holes (donut, button, black), the Zero Wing, the Nobody Room—where the Invisible Man is the star attraction—and more. With pages full of witty details to discover, this captivating book is perfect for curious kids ages 5-9 looking for their next big mind-bending adventure. Hardcover48 pagesAge range: 5-9Random House, 20238 x 11 inchesISBN 9781662651441Children's Picture Books

The Museum of Nothing

By Bernadette Watts "Sensitive, tender, and gorgeously illustrated." –Kirkus Reviews, starred review Inspired by a famous story of Franz Kafka, European artist Bernadette Watts reimagines the legend of this literary figure and the letters he writes to comfort a young girl who has lost her doll. Nothing is lost if it remains alive in our hearts! While strolling through the park, Franz Kafka hears the cry of a young girl named Saskia sitting with her mother. When Franz learns that the child has lost her beloved doll, Christiana, Franz reassures her that her doll is traveling the world. Upon their next fortuitous meetings, Franz presents Saskia and her mother with postcards from the lost doll—one from Paris, another from Venice, and finally one from Egypt. When Saskia insists that her doll Christiana come home from her travels, Franz is distraught until he finds a vintage doll in a secondhand shop. Saskia is skeptical—the doll looks old. But when Franz reminds her that we all age from our amazing journeys through life, her heart bursts with joy at their being reunited. Inspired by a famous story, this moving account of generosity highlights the power of imagination and offers a window into the enigmatic life of one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Hardcover40 pagesAge range: 4-8NorthSouth Books, 2024 8.5 x 0.4 x 11 inchesISBN 9780735845565Children's, Art History

Wish You Were Here: Postcards from Franz Kafka

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 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

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

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 Yevgenia Nayberg “Illustrated in dynamic, mostly primary colors that mirror Florine’s customary palettes. . . A passionate ode to a pioneering female artist whose influence endures and inspires.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review A young girl forms a special connection to the modernist painter Florine Stettheimer, and imagines herself joining in on Florine’s exciting life. When a young girl visits the museum, she finds an unexpected friend in a self-portrait of Florine Stettheimer. They’re both artists; they both have Jewish families; they even look alike! Florine’s life was wild and glamorous. She painted people in flight and buildings that grew from the ground like crooked trees, bright colors and shapes and animals. She threw parties frequented by other famous visionaries like Marcel Duchamp and Carl Van Vechten. Soon, our narrator is dreaming up her own fantastical parties for Florine, with table spreads of colorful treats, and painting and dancing and poetry. With Florine in her life, even a rainy day can’t make the world seem humdrum anymore. A Party for Florine is an unapologetically whimsical fan letter to an artist whose influence is clear in Sydney Taylor Honoree Yevgenia Nayberg’s captivating illustrations. Dreamers, creators, and budding modernists will be drawn into the young protagonist’s party just as strongly as she is drawn into Stettheimer’s paintings. Hardcover40 pagesAge range: 4-8Neal Porter Books, 20248.62 x 0.41 x 11.24 inchesISBN 9780823454105Children's Book

A Party for Florine: Florine Stettheimer and Me

By Anja von Kampen Illustrated Kilian Schütz and Mat Heldwein Knietzsche thinks that some friends seem to fall from the sky like shooting stars, and some friendships seem to grow at a snail’s pace. However the friendship comes about – a true friend is always there for you and will never betray you. A short story about the family you choose for yourself. Paperback24 pagesvision X GmbH, 2018Age 54.7 x 4.7 inches ISBN 9783981905571

Knietzsche and Friendship

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 Yoko TawadaTranslated by Susan Bernofsky "Yoko Tawada conjures a world between languages. . . . She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds."― Julian Lucas, The New Yorker "Tawada is interested in language at its most elusive or incomprehensible."― Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books A moving story about friendship, illness, and the poetry of Paul Celan by the astonishing Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book Award Patrik, who sometimes calls himself “the patient,” is a literary researcher living in present-day Berlin. The city is just coming back to life after lockdown, and his beloved opera houses are open again, but Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. When he shaves his head, his girlfriend scolds him, “What have you done to your head? I don’t want to be with a prisoner from a concentration camp!” He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he can’t manage to get past the first question on the registration form: “What is your nationality?” Then at a café (or in the memory of being at a café?), he meets a mysterious stranger. The man’s name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik… In the spirit of imaginative homage like Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain, Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem, and Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Yoko Tawada’s mesmerizing new novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which friendship, conversation, reading, poetry, and music are the connecting threads that bind us together. Paperback144 pagesNorton, 20244.5 x 0.4 x 7.3 inchesISBN 9780811234870Literary Fiction

Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel

By Cathleen Schine An NPR Best Book of the Year "A moving and entertaining novel about how we revisit memories to make meaning for ourselves and others. . . . Ms. Schine has a wonderful ability to weave research and substantive ideas into her novels without weighing them down. Her buoyant dialogue has the zip of great comedy routines." ―Wall Street Journal "Künstlers in Paradise is a tender family story, but it is also a profound meditation on the nature and power of storytelling, inheritance, and legacy, the malleability and perdurability of memory." ―Boston Globe There was a time when the family Künstler lived in the fairy-tale city of Vienna. Circumstances transformed the fairy tale into a nightmare, and in 1939 the Künstlers found their way out of Vienna and into a new fairy tale: Los Angeles, California, United States of America. For years Mamie Künstler, ninety-three years old, as clever and glamorous as ever, has lived happily in her bungalow in Venice, California, with her inscrutable housekeeper and her gigantic St. Bernard. Their tranquility is upended when Mamie’s grandson Julian arrives from New York City. Like many a twentysomething, he has come to seek his fortune in Hollywood. But it is 2020, the global pandemic sweeps in, and Julian’s short visit suddenly has no end in sight. Mamie was only eleven when the Künstlers escaped Vienna in 1939. They made their way, stunned and overwhelmed, to sunny, surreal Los Angeles, where they joined a colony of distinguished Jewish musicians, writers, and intellectuals also escaping Hitler. Now, faced with months of lockdown and a willing listener, Mamie begins to tell Julian the buried stories of her years in Los Angeles: her escapades with eminent émigrés like Arnold Schoenberg, Christopher Isherwood, Thomas Mann. Oh, and Greta Garbo. While the pandemic cuts Julian off from the life he knows, Mamie’s tales open up a world of lives that came before him. They reveal to him just how much the past holds of the future. Paperback272 pagesHolt Paperbacks, 20247.15 x 0.7 x 8.2 inchesISBN 9781250892492Historical Fiction

Künstlers in Paradise [Paperback]

By Alexander Lernet-Holenia Translated by Ignat Avsey “The cast of this brilliant thriller … are pure Raymond Chandler … but the Viennese setting gives it an extra, stylish twist. It’s excellently written and fearsomely gripping.”—Kate Saunders, The Times “A terrific fast-moving book. . . a truly clever, rather wonderful book that both plays with and defies genre”—Irish Times “A fascinating snapshot of Vienna between the wars, pacey and entertaining.”—Laura Wilson, Guardian A taxi-driver in 1930s Vienna impersonates a murder victim, and is caught into a dangerous spiral Twice adapted for film, I Was Jack Mortimer is a tale of misappropriated identity as darkly captivating and twisting as the books of Patricia Highsmith. “One doesn’t step into anyone’s life, not even a dead man’s, without having to live it to the end.” A man climbs into Ferdinand Sponer’s cab, gives the name of a hotel, and before he reaches it has been murdered: shot through the throat. And though Sponer has so far committed no crime, he is drawn into the late Jack Mortimer’s life, and might not be able to escape its tangles and intrigues before it is too late… Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: outstanding classic storytelling from around the world, in a stylishly original series design. From newly rediscovered gems to fresh translations of the world’s greatest authors, this series includes such authors as Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Gaito Gazdanov. Paperback160 pagesPushkin Press Classics, 20245 x 7 inchesISBN 9781805330370Thriller, Crime, Literary Fiction

I Was Jack Mortimer

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

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)

Edited by Charlotte Lee A greatest-hits selection from some of the most popular poets of the Romantic movement, including Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel, and Heine, in a gorgeously jacketed small hardcover. Unlike the more earnest English Romantic poets, followers of the Romantic movement in Germany valued wit and humor along with beauty. Admiration for nature is also prominent in their poetry, and in particular the dramatic forests which still cover large areas of Germany. Love and death crop up repeatedly as themes in such famous works as Goethe’s “Elf King” and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Characters from myth and folklore abound—most famously Lorelei, an enchantress who is associated with the rock of the same name on the bank of the Rhine, who is featured in several poems in this volume. Also gathered here are such favorites as Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine,” Schiller’s “The Visit of the Gods,” Eichendorff’s “Nocturne,” and Heine’s “The Magic Month of May,” along with works by the most famous women writers of the Romantic era, including Karoline von Günderrode and Sophie Mereau.Everyman’s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.Hardcover256 pagesEveryman's Library, 20244.125 x 6.25 inchesISBN 9781101908358Poetry, Classics, German Romanticism

German Romantic Poets

Pepin Press’ Watercolour Postcard Books contain 16 cards made of the finest 250 gsm watercolor paper. The paper is acid-free, FSC-certified and quite thick to make the cards suitable for mailing. They are a joy to color with a wide range of techniques, such as watercolor, ink, color pencil, crayon, etc. All the coloring books match the quality the quality of the finest professional coloring pads. In order to get the best results, high-quality colouring materials are recommended. Paperback16 pagesPepin Press, 20244 x 6 inchesISBN 9789460096389Activity Book, Art Nouveau

Gustav Klimt: Watercolor Postcard Book

PEPIN Artists’ Coloring Books contain 12 sheets of superior acid-free drawing paper, printed with exceptional designs in very light lines.The printing is done in such a way that, depending on the techniques used, the original outline will be hardly visible after coloring. The 180 gsm drawing paper is made to Pepin's specifications by one of the best paper mills in Europe and is suitable for a wide range of coloring applications, including pencil, crayon, pastel, felt marker, gouache, etc. Also watercolors and liquid inks can be used. Pepin's first-rate paper has a long life and colored sheets can be framed and displayed without the risk of rapid deterioration.These books match the quality of the finest artists’ pads. They are perfectly suited to practice your coloring skills and create beautiful pieces at the same time. High-quality coloring materials are recommended. Paperback 12 pagesPepin Press, 202410 x 13 inchesISBN 9789460098284Activity Book, Coloring Book

Vincent van Gogh: Artists' Coloring Book

Pepin Press’ Watercolour Postcard Books contain 16 cards made of the finest 250 gsm watercolor paper. The paper is acid-free, FSC-certified and quite thick to make the cards suitable for mailing. They are a joy to color with a wide range of techniques, such as watercolor, ink, color pencil, crayon, etc. All the coloring books match the quality the quality of the finest professional coloring pads. In order to get the best results, high-quality colouring materials are recommended. Paperback16 pagesPepin Press, 20244 x 6 inchesISBN 9789460096327Activity Book, Art Deco

Alphonse Mucha: Watercolor Postcard Book

Pepin Press’ Watercolor Postcard Books contain 16 cards made of the finest 250 gsm watercolor paper. The paper is acid-free, FSC-certified and quite thick to make the cards suitable for mailing. They are a joy to color with a wide range of techniques, such as watercolor, ink, color pencil, crayon, etc. All of Pepin's coloring books match the quality the quality of the finest professional coloring pads. In order to get the best results, we recommend the use of high-quality coloring materials.Paperback16 Pages/CardsPepin Press, 20244 x 6 InchesISBN 9789460096402 Activity Books, Stationery

William Morris: Watercolor Postcard Book

Von Michael Ende und Simona Ceccarelli Diese Bilderbuchpremiere zum 50. Jubiläum von Momo feiert ein zentrales Motiv der weltberühmten Erzählung: das Geheimnis des Zuhörens und der Achtsamkeit.Am Rande der großen Stadt, in den Ruinen eines Amphitheaters, lebt Momo. Niemand weiß, woher sie kommt, aber alle kennen ihre besondere Gabe: Momo kann auf eine ganz besondere Art und Weise zuhören. Sie hört den Leuten aus der Stadt zu, den Kindern, ja sogar den Tieren und dem Wind in den Bäumen. Wenn Momo ihrem Freund Gigi zuhört, fallen ihm plötzlich die unglaublichsten Geschichten ein. Und Beppo Straßenkehrer, der meistens schweigt, findet bei Momo die richtigen Worte und kann seine große Weisheit teilen: Einen Weg, der einem unendlich lang scheint, den schafft man nur Schritt für Schritt.Dieses faszinierende Buch lädt Kinder und Erwachsene ein zu entdecken, was passiert, wenn man Zeit verschenkt, indem man zuhört.Die Originaltexte aus Momo wurden von Uwe-Michael Gutzschhahn sorgfältig ausgewählt und von Illustratorin Simona Ceccarelli in atemberaubende Bilder verwandelt.Hardcover32 PagesText in GermanThienemann Verlag, 20239.13 x 0.31 x 11.81 inchesISBN 9783522460514Family, Fiction

Momo: Ein Bilderbuch

Dogs through the eras of art. Dogs have been man’s best friend for as long as we’ve been sketching on canvas. In the background, behind the table, or right at the forefront, dogs of the past peer out from paintings and sketches, frescoes and prints across art history.Art Dog is a collection of these painted pooches, featuring works from artists across the ages and continents. Japanese prints and German oils, American sketches and Italian murals are all included. The works spans eras and styles, but as different as these dogs are, one thing shines through: the love we’ve always had for them. Hardcover96 PagesSmith Street Books, 20237.77 x 0.58 x 9.34 inchesISBN 9781922754264 Art History

Art Dog: Clever Canines of the Art World

By Jac Jemc"Modern and mythic, Empty Theatre captures the outrageous taste of an era while measuring the steep costs of our dream worlds."―Katy Simpson Smith, the New York Times"Surreal, witty, tongue-in-cheek, and distinctly singular, just like the subjects whose life it covers, this is not your mother’s historical fiction. Buckle up for a wild ride, and enjoy every second of it."―David Vogel, BuzzFeed News"...one of the most engrossing and entertaining historical novels in recent memory."―Seth Combs, The San Diego Union TribuneA wildly over-the-top social satire reimagining the mad misadventures of the iconic royal cousins King Ludwig and Empress Sisi, from the incomparable Jac Jemc.History knows them as King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Empress Elizabeth of Austria, icons of the late nineteenth century who died young and left behind magnificent portraits and palaces. But to each other they were Ludwig and Sisi, cousins who shared a passion for beauty and a stubborn refusal to submit to the roles imposed upon them. Ludwig, simultaneously spoiled and punished for his softness and “unmanly” interests, falls hard for the operas of Richard Wagner and neglects his state duties in the pursuit of art. Sisi, married at the age of sixteen to her beloved Franzl, bristles at the restrictions of her elevated position, the value placed on her beauty, and the simultaneous expectation that she ravage her body again and again in childbirth. Both absurdly vain, both traumatized by the demands of their roles, Sisi and Ludwig struggle against the ideals they are expected to embody, and resist through extravagance, petulance, performance, and frivolity.A tragicomic tour de force, Empty Theatre immerses readers in Ludwig and Sisi’s rarefied, ridiculous, restrictive world—where the aesthetics of excess belie the isolation of its inhabitants. With wit, pathos, and imagination, Jac Jemc takes us on an unforgettable journey through two extraordinary parallel lives and the complex, tenuous friendship that links them.Paperback464 pagesPicador Paper, 20244.9 x 1.2 x 7.9 inchesISBN 9781250872180Austrian Historical Fiction, Literature

Empty Theatre [Paperback]

By Teresa PräauerTranslated by Kári DriscollAn unveiling of the presence of captivating figures and creatures throughout history.In this gripping philosophical and cultural exploration, Teresa Präauer sets out to investigate figures of transformation, transmission, and translation—across languages, cultures, genres, media, species, and spaces. Hybrids, chimeras, monsters, and liminal creatures of all sorts inhabit these pages, as indeed they do the pages of the cultural archive from Antiquity and the Middle Ages to the present day: everything from the harpies, ape-men, and cynocephali that inhabit the edges of medieval maps and taxonomies to the Krampuses and Furries that roam through Alpine villages and convention centers today. Yet these chimeras are not aberrations; rather, they reveal an essential truth about culture and artistic expression.What emerges in Becoming Animal is a kaleidoscopic image of culture as the constant probing of the limits of the sayable, as an unending process of attempting to capture in words and symbols that which cannot be pinned down.Hardcover132 pagesSeagull Books, 20245 x 8 inchesISBN 9781803093321Literature

Becoming Animal

By Rahel Levin VarnhagenEdited and Translated by Peter WortsmanA personal look into the mind of one of Europe’s first and foremost women of letters. At times poetic but not a poem, prosaic but not an essay, a letter is often pure writing for writing’s sake. Such is the case for Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, née Levin, the illustrious German-Jewish Berlin literary salon hostess from the early nineteenth century. She penned over ten thousand letters to more than three hundred recipients, including princes, philosophers, poets, family members, and the family cook. Written with a wink at posterity, collected and first published after her passing by her husband, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, these letters constitute a singular contribution to German literature. Varied in subject—from family affairs to linguistic, literary, and pressing social concerns—the poignant lyricism of her letters is all the more remarkable when we take into account that High German was not her first language; she grew up speaking, reading, and writing primarily Yiddish. Her shaky social status as a woman and a member of a precarious minority, combined with an astounding lucidity and a rare capacity to put her thoughts into words, made her a force to be reckoned with in her lifetime and thereafter as one of Germany’s preeminent women of letters. As we see in I Just Let Life Rain Down on Me, her voice is as fresh and original as that of any of the recognized poets and thinkers of her day. As Rahel herself put it: “[O]ur language is our lived life; I invented mine for my own purposes, I was less able than many others to make use of preconceived turns of phrase, which is why mine are often clumsy, and in all respects faulty, but always true.” Hardcover232 pagesSeagull Books, 20246 x 9 inchesISBN 9781803093369 Jewish Studies, Biography

I Just Let Life Rain Down on Me: Selected Letters and Reflections

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 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 Brothers GrimmIllustrated and retold by Paul O. Zelinsky Caldecott Medal Winner Surely among the most original and gifted of children’s book illustrators, Paul O. Zelinsky has once again with unmatched emotional authority, control of space, and narrative capability brought forth a unique vision for an age-old tale. Few artists at work today can touch the level at which his paintings tell a story and exert their hold.Zelinsky’s retelling of Rapunzel reaches back beyond the Grimms to a late-seventeenth-century French tale by Mlle. la Force, who based hers on the Neapolitan tale Petrosinella in a collection popular at the time. The artist understands the story’s fundamentals to be about possessiveness, confinement, and separation, rather than about punishment and deprivation. Thus the tower the sorceress gives Rapunzel here is not a desolate, barren structure of denial but one of esoteric beauty on the outside and physical luxury within. And the world the artist creates through the elements in his paintings the palette, control of light, landscape, characters, architecture, interiors, costumes speaks to us not of an ugly witch who cruelly imprisons a beautiful young girl, but of a mother figure who powerfully resists her child’s inevitable growth, and of a young woman and man who must struggle in the wilderness for the self-reliance that is the true beginning of their adulthood.As ever, and yet always somehow in newly arresting fashion, Paul O. Zelinsky’s work thrillingly shows us the events of the story while guiding us beyond them to the truths that have made it endure.Hardcover48 pagesAge range: 5-8Dutton Books for Young Readers, 19979 x 12 inchesISBN 9780525456070Children's, Story Book

Rapunzel

By Annemarie SchwarzenbachTranslated from the German by Lucy Renner JonesAfterword by Roger Perret Schwarzenbach’s clear, psychologically acute prose makes this novella an evocative narrative, with many intriguing parallels to her own life.Annemarie Schwarzenbach—journalist, novelist, antifascist, archaeologist, and traveler—has become a European cult figure for bohemian free spirits since the rediscovery of her works in the late 1980s. Lyric Novella is her story of a young man’s obsession with a Berlin variété actress. Despite having his future career mapped out for him in the diplomatic service, the young man begins to question all his family values under Sibylle’s spell. His family, future, and social standing become irrelevant when set against his overriding compulsion to pick her up every night from the theater so they can go for a drive. Bringing the story back to her own life, Schwarzenbach admitted after publication that her hero was in fact a young woman, not a man, leaving little doubt that Lyric Novella is a literary tale of lesbian love during socially and politically turbulent times.Paperback138 pagesSeagull Books, 20225 x 1 x 8 inchesISBN 9781803090375Swiss Writer, Romance

Lyric Novella

By Edmund de Waal"[de Waal] demonstrates, in this slim and elegant volume, how words can hold our memories as well as objects while taking up infinitely less space." —Maurice Samuels, The New York Times Book ReviewA tragic family history told in a collection of imaginary letters to a famed collector, Moïse de Camondo.63 rue de Monceau, ParisDear friend,As you may have guessed by now, I am not in your house by accident. I know your street rather well.Count Moïse de Camondo lived a few doors away from Edmund de Waal’s forebears, the Ephrussi, first encountered in his bestselling memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes. Like the Ephrussi, the Camondos were part of belle epoque high society. They were also targets of antisemitism.Camondo created a spectacular house and filled it with the greatest private collection of French eighteenth-century art for his son, Nissim, to inherit. But when Nissim was killed in the First World War, it became a memorial and, upon the Count’s death, was bequeathed to France.The Musée Nissim de Camondo has remained unchanged since 1936. De Waal explores the lavish rooms and detailed archives and uncovers new layers to the family story. In a series of haunting letters addressed to the Count, he tells us what happened next.Paperback 192 pagesPicador, 20225.64 x 0.78 x 8.86 inchesISBN 9781250851062French History, Jewish History

Letters to Camondo

By Sue Hubbard“A triumph of literary and artistic understanding, a tour de force: Masterly, moving and beautifully written.” —Fay WeldonA dazzling novel about groundbreaking artist, Paula Modersohn-Becker—a brilliant early expressionist who toiled under the shadow of her lover Rainer Maria RilkeGirl in White is the extraordinary story of the German expressionist painter Paula Modershohn-Becker (1876-1907), told from the fictionalized perspective of her daughter, Mathilde.Written with the eye of a painter and the soul of a poet this moving story is a meditation on love, loss, memory and, ultimately, hope.Paula Modersohn-Becker was a pioneer of modern art in Europe, but denounced as degenerate by the Nazis after her death. Poet and art critic Sue Hubbard draws on the artist’s diaries and paintings to bring to life her singular existence, her battle to achieve independence and recognition and her intense relationship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and her struggle to find a balance between being a painter, wife, and mother.Not only do we discover Paula’s vibrant personality and rich legacy of Expressionist paintings, but also come to understand something of the corrupted ideologies of the Third Reich in a book that’s perfect for fans of books like Georgia by Dawn Tripp and The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer.Paperback320 pagesPushkin Press, 20235 x 7.77 inchesISBN 9781782279129Historical Fiction

Girl in White

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 Sibylle von Olfers An adorable mini edition of Sibylle von Olfers' classic nature story with art nouveau illustrations. Perfect for fans of Cicely Mary Barker's Flower Fairies and Elsa Beskow. Far far away, the butterfly children play, dance and sing all day long with their little brothers and sisters, the caterpillars. The children can't wait until the first day of spring, when they will finally get their wings. But first, they must learn about the many brightly colored flowers in the kingdom, so they can take part in the flying procession of peacock, swallowtail, red admiral and many other butterflies. Hardcover28 pagesFloris Books, 2023Age range: 3-6 years7.75 x 0.25 x 5.75 inchesISBN 9781782508311Children's, Classics

The Story of the Butterfly Children: Mini edition

This book was featured as part of our Literatur Café series. By Ulrich Baer Honorable Mention in the 2001 Harry Levin Prize, sponsored by the American Comparative Literature Association."This innovative study of the works of Baudelaire and Celan opens a new window on the history of modern identity in western culture."—Germanic Notes and ReviewsIn a bold reassessment, this book analyzes the works of Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan, two poets who frame our sense of modern poetry and define the beginning and end of modernity itself.The two poets share a feature that seems to block their placement in such an easy chronological or historical scheme: each accounts for an experience that will not fully enter memory, but dissipates in the mind in the form of trauma, fragments, and shock. While Baudelaire, as Paul Valéry was the first to show, explores the trauma of the minute personal shocks of everyday existence in modern life, Celan engages with the catastrophic magnitude of the Holocaust and how it has altered our understanding of history. Can we relate the shocks registered in Baudelaire's poems to the historical horror addressed in Celan's work without denying either the singularity of suffering and loss or the uniqueness of the historical event of the Shoah?Drawing on trauma studies and Holocaust research, Remnants of Song challenges existing interpretations of Baudelaire and Celan by constantly holding in view both the aesthetic dimension of their works and their historical import. The author demonstrates that the act of engaging with a poem on its own terms may serve as an important model for an ethical response to the radical experiences of trauma. Answering Adorno's famous dictum that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz, he shows that Celan's poetry continues to posit its own truth by drawing on Baudelaire as a precedent—yet it does so in ways that have little to do with conventional understandings of history.Hardcover360 pagesStanford University Press, 20005.5 x 8.5 inches ISBN 9780804738262Literary Criticism

Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan

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 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

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 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 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 Jac Jemc“[An] audacious social satire. Comedic, tragic, and all around entertaining, Empty Theatre is a welcome addition to Jemc’s bibliography.”—Chicago Review of Books"Jac Jemc’s dreamscape of a novel weaves history and imagination into a wonder world. Empty Theater is an ingenious and totally absorbing gambol through beauty, decadence, and the bizarre absurdities of lives spent in the dizzying clouds of royalty and pomp. Jemc is a writer of enviable talent and soulful intelligence."—Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark DarkA wildly over-the-top social satire reimagining the mad misadventures of the iconic royal cousins King Ludwig and Empress Sisi, from the incomparable Jac Jemc.History knows them as King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Empress Elizabeth of Austria, icons of the late nineteenth century who died young and left behind magnificent portraits and palaces. But to each other they were Ludwig and Sisi, cousins who shared a passion for beauty and a stubborn refusal to submit to the roles imposed upon them.Ludwig, simultaneously spoiled and punished for his softness and "unmanly" interests, falls hard for the operas of Richard Wagner and neglects his state duties in the pursuit of art. Sisi, married at the age of sixteen to her beloved Franzl, bristles at the restrictions of her elevated position, the value placed on her beauty, and the simultaneous expectation that she ravage her body again and again in childbirth. Both absurdly vain, both traumatized by the demands of their roles, Sisi and Ludwig struggle against the ideals they are expected to embody, and resist through extravagance, petulance, performance, and frivolity.A tragicomic tour de force, Empty Theatre immerses readers in Ludwig and Sisi’s rarefied, ridiculous, restrictive world—where the aesthetics of excess belie the isolation of its inhabitants. With wit, pathos, and imagination, Jac Jemc takes us on an unforgettable journey through two extraordinary parallel lives and the complex, tenuous friendship that linked them.Hardcover464 pagesMCD, 20235.8 x 1.4 x 8.6 inchesISBN 9780374277925Satire, Literature

Empty Theatre: A Novel

By Ilya ZdanevichEdited by Sezgin BoynikTranslated by Pavels Smišlajevs and Michel ChevalierThe second volume of the bie bao series presents a eulogy entitled Iliazda at the Birthday Party, a pseudo-autobiographical lecture delivered by Ilya Zdanevich in Paris in 1922. It reports on Zdanevich's artistic and political adventures up until then. Along with an autobiography full of self-admiration, in this lecture Zdanevich gives an interpretation of his zaum dramas inspired by Freudianism, and humorously describes a colorful image of the Russian microcosm in Montparnasse.Additionally, this second volume also includes Iliazd's letter to Ardengo Soffici from 1964, where one can read, in the most unambiguous terms, about Zdanevich's positions against war, imperialism, and all forms of nationalism. Subtitled 50 Years of Russian Futurism, the letter to Soffici presents us with an altogether new Zdanevich—a "fellow traveller" in both leftist and avant-garde circles. As well as the extended introduction and extensive annotations, the texts are further contextualized with Johanna Drucker's visual presentation of the birth of the Iliazd cult. Paperback96 pagesRab-Rab Press, 20226.6 x 4.3 inchesISBN 9789526938998Autobiography

Iliazda at the Birthday Party: Autiobiographical Lecture, 1922

By Ferdinand BrucknerTranslated by Laurence SenelickTwo Plays of Weimar Germany offers new translations, by the renowned theater scholar and translator Laurence Senelick, of popular works by the playwright Ferdinand Bruckner: Youth Is a Sickness (Krankheit der Jugend) and Criminals (Die Verbrecher). Though his fame was later eclipsed by peers such as Bertolt Brecht, Bruckner was the celebrity dramatist of his time, and a new generation of readers is discovering his groundbreaking plays known for their strong cultural critique and unflinching portrayals of social ills, outcasts, and misfits. Youth Is a Sickness (1924) explores the lives of Germany's "lost generation," those who grew up during and after the cataclysm of the First World War, devoid of hope and ideals, lost in a haze of sex and drugs. Criminals (1926) traces several court cases about a failed double suicide, theft, abortion, and homosexual blackmail, controversial topics for the audience of its time and even today. Its innovative staging and interwoven storylines illuminate the imposed social tensions and legal injustice faced by the characters.In this expert translation, readers can see Bruckner as a public intellectual, a man committed to commenting on the fate of Germany; humane values; and the past, present, and future in his work. With an introduction by the translator, this volume will be the definitive version for readers, actors, playwrights, and scholars.Paperback296 pagesNorthwestern University Press, 20185 x 8 inchesISBN 9780810137721 Plays, Theatre

Two Plays of Weimar Germany: Youth is a Sickness and Criminals

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

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