On its publication in German, Against the World was hailed as an immediate classic. "One of the most spectacular debuts of recent decades," said Kulturspiegel, while Der Spiegel went even farther: "Against the World is the book of books." Now English-language readers will get their first chance to see what German readers have already learned: this is a big, ambitious, over-the-top masterpiece.
Set in the East Friesia region of Germany in the mid-1970s, Against the World tells the story of Daniel Kuper, the nominal heir to a drugstore dynasty, and his...

Almost twenty years after the fall of the wall, the Kreuzberg district of Berlin has become unbearably trendy and deeply unappealing to Alina and Wolf. They move to Muggelsee, at the city's bucolic border, where the differences between East and West have not yet faded and strange encounters with men from the vanished republic are still a part of daily life. But there, Wolf finds himself increasingly strained by the triviality of his daily routine with Alina. The monotony of life in their comfortable apartment gives way, however, when an old girlfriend surfaces and Wolf escapes his boredom...

On October 5, 2012, the German national newspaper Die Welt published its daily issue--but things looked . . . different. Quieter. The sensations of the day, forgotten as soon as they're read, were missing, replaced with an unprecedented calm, extracted with care from the chaos of the contemporary.

That calm was the work of Gerhard Richter, who had been granted control over Die Welt for that single day, taking over and imprinting all thirty pages of the newspaper with his personal stamp: images from quiet moments amid unquiet times, the demotion of politics from its primary...

The second book in Seagull's ambitious series of Georg Trakl's works, Sebastian Dreaming was the second, and final, collection prepared for publication by Trakl himself. Published after his death, it was perhaps even tied to it: forced into a military hospital by the psychological trauma of his World War I experiences, the Austrian poet requested that his publisher send him proofs of the book. He waited a week, and then overdosed on cocaine.
A century later, the book appears for the first time in English. While a number of its poems have been included in other collections,...

In 2010, Robert Menasse journeyed to Brussels to begin work on a novel centered on the European Union. His extended stay resulted in a completely different book--Enraged Citizens, European Peace and Democratic Deficits, a work of nonfiction examining the history of the European project and the evolving politics of nation-states.
Spanning from the beginning of the transnational idea with 1951's Montanunion--the European Coal and Steel Community--to the current financial crisis, Menasse focuses on the institutional structures and forces both advancing and obstructing the European...

During a 1960 interview, East German writer Christa Wolf was asked a curious question: would she describe in detail what she did on September 27th? Fascinated by considering the significance of a single day over many years, Wolf began keeping a detailed diary of September 27th, a practice which she carried on for more than fifty years until her death in 2011. The first volume of these notes covered 1960 through 2000 was published to great acclaim more than a decade ago. Now translator Katy Derbyshire is bringing the September 27th collection up to date with One Day a Year--a collection...

The work of poet Georg Trakl, a leading Austrian-German expressionist, has been praised by many, including his contemporaries Rainer Maria Rilke and Else Lasker-Schuler, as well as his patron Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein famously wrote that while he did not truly understand Trakl's poems, they had the tone of a "truly ingenious person," which pleased him.

A Skeleton Plays Violin comprises the final volume in a trilogy of works by Trakl published by Seagull Books. This selection gathers Trakl's early, middle, and late work, none of it published in book form during his...

Winner of the 2015 Arno Reinfrank Literaturpreis

"Ruven Preuk stands apart from the village, on an August day in 1911, and listens." Thus begins an epic bildungsroman about the life of Ruven Preuk, son of the wainwright, child of a sleepy village in Germany's north, where life is both simple and harsh.

Ruven, though, is neither. He has the ability to see sounds, leading him to discover an uncanny gift for the violin. When he meets a talented teacher in the Jewish quarter, Ruven falls under the spell of a prodigious future. But as the twentieth...

At the Burning Abyss is Franz Fuhmann's magnum opus--a gripping and profoundly personal encounter with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of two troubled lives, a turbulent century, and the liberating power of poetry.

Picking up where his last book, The Jew Car, left off, Fuhmann probes his own susceptibility to ideology's seductions--Nazism, then socialism--and examines their antidote, the goad of Trakl's enigmatic verses. He confronts Trakl's "unlivable life," as his poetry transcends the panaceas of black-and-white ideology, ultimately...

From the 1920s through the 1950s, Bertolt Brecht wrote a number of short, fictionalized comments on contemporary life, politics, and thought. Through the dramatic events of the first half of the twentieth century, Brecht's Mr. Keuner offered up aphorisms, stray thoughts, and fragments of anecdote that punctured contemporary self-regard about religion, politics, business, and more. Deceptively light in tone, and bite-size in presentation, Mr. Keuner's comments bring Brecht's lacerating wit to bear on a wide range of the half-truths and public lies of his era.

This graphic novel adaptation...