"A word, a word so easily spoken; it is not spoken."I am developing a minor obsession with the literature of the 19th and early 20th century Hapsburg Empire, and I can't quite put my finger on why, or how it started, unless it was when I read about Robert Musil in Philip Ball's amazing Critical M...
I found this book to be a delightful piece of historical fiction, rich in detail, history and even humor. :) As Adam begins the story in his own words, I was hooked instantly. Here's a short *grin* summary:The book begins in 1811 in pre-unification Germany as a farmer enlists his unwitting farmha...
Whether you continued to try and swim. The brief moment when you went down, before you suffocated. When you stopped struggling for breath, stopped thrashing about with your arms. The instant in which he'd given up, and maybe swam a couple more strokes, not to get to the surface, there was no poin...
But could I? Could I even cope with my own life? And then I thought: If Adolf and I can't cope with life, then we should at least unite against those unscrupulous people who want to rule because they are unimaginative, against the real Pfaffraths, the real Judejahns, the real Klingspors, and perh...
Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant and successful poet to emerge from the former East Germany, a place where, he wrote, "the best refuge was a closed mouth." In unsettling, often funny, sometimes savage lines whose vivid images reflect his deep love for and connection ...
Banned by the Nazis in 1936 for its frank sexual themes, Wolfgang Koeppen's first novel is at last appearing in English. A romance that anticipated Beat literature by nearly twenty years through its dizzying language and exploration of casual love, this is Koeppen's most hilarious work, one that ...
The Stalin Front, also published as The Stalin Organ, by Gert Ledig (1921-1999) is a novel about Russo-German fighting during World War II. It was first published in German in 1955, sixteen years after the author volunteered in the army. The English translation by Michael Hofmann appeared only re...
ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI For twenty years, since I first read the first poem, “To Go to Lvov”—in his first English-language book, Tremor—I have had a happily unexamined admiration for the work of the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. Hence, perhaps, the inordinate difficulty—even for me, with my sluggishness...