Michael Hofmann
Author
Description
It is one of the most memorable first lines in all of literature: "When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin." So begins Kafka's famous short story, The Metamorphosis . Kafka considered publishing it with two of the stories included here in a volume to be called Punishments. The Judgment explores an enigmatic power struggle between a father and son, while In the Penal Colony...
3) Kairos
Author
Series
A New Directions book volume NDP1599
Description
"Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation) is an epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature. Erpenbeck's new novel Kairos-an unforgettably compelling masterpiece tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes...
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Description
One of the great war memoirs, published here in a stunning Deluxe Edition for the centenary of World War I and the Battle of the Somme - and featuring a foreword by the New York Times bestselling author of Matterhorn A worldwide bestseller published shortly after the end of World War I, Storm of Steel is a memoir of astonishing power, savagery, and ashen lyricism. It illuminates not only the horrors but also the fascination of total war, as seen...
Author
Pub. Date
[2015]
Description
Blood Brothers is the only known novel by German social worker and journalist Ernst Haffner, of whom nearly all traces were lost during the course of World War II. Told in stark, unsparing detail, Haffner's story delves into the illicit underworld of Berlin on the eve of Hitler's rise to power, describing how these blood brothers move from one petty crime to the next, spending their nights in underground bars and makeshift hostels, struggling together...
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Description
"Werner Herzog, one of the most revered filmmakers of all time, in his first book in many years, tells the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who continued to defend a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the end of World War Two In 1997, Werner Herzog was in Tokyo to direct an opera. His hosts there asked, whom would you like to meet? He replied instantly: Hiroo Onoda. Onoda was a former solider famous for having quixotically...
Author
Pub. Date
2021
Description
"A new story collection from "one of Europe's most exciting writers" (New York Times Book Review) deftly evokes and explores the shifts that occur when the world grows dark. Georg is on the verge of retirement. No one notices him anymore at the office, and there is no dinner waiting for him at home. He seems to dissolve slowly and a nameless horror seizes him. Sabrina is flattered when an artist approaches her. But when she sees herself as a work...
Author
Pub. Date
[2017]
Description
Happily married with two children and a comfortable home in a Swiss town, Thomas and Astrid enjoy a glass of wine in their garden on a night like any other. Called back to the house by their son's cries, Astrid goes inside, expecting her husband to join her in a bit. But Thomas gets up and, after a brief moment of hesitation, opens the gate and walks out. No longer bound by the ties of his everyday life--family, friends, work--Thomas begins a winding...