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...

After years on the job, police detective Jakob Franck has retired. Finally, the dead--with all their mysteries--will no longer have any claim on him.

Or so he thinks. On a cold autumn afternoon, a case he thought he'd long put behind him returns to his life--and turns it upside down. The Nameless Day tells the story of that twenty-year-old case, which began with Franck carrying the news of the suicide of a seventeen-year-old girl to her mother, and holding her for seven hours as, in her grief, she said not a single word. Now her father has appeared, swearing to Franck that his...

Hans Magnus Enzensberger takes the title for this collection of daring short essays on topical themes--politics, economics, religion, society--not from Jeremy Bentham's famous prison but from a mid-1930s Cabinet of Curiosities opened in Germany by Karl Valentin. -There, - writes Enzensberger, -viewers could admire, along with implements of torture, all manner of abnormalities and sensational inventions.- And that's what he offers here: a wide-ranging, surprising look at all manner of strange aspects of our contemporary world.
As masterly with the essay as he is with fiction and poetry,...

"I now no longer use the better words."
Ilse Aichinger (1921-2016) was one of the most important writers of postwar Austrian and German literature. Born in 1921 to a Jewish mother, she survived World War II in Vienna, while her twin sister Helga escaped with one of the last Kindertransporte to England in 1938. Many of their relatives were deported and murdered.

Those losses make themselves felt throughout Aichinger's writing, which since her first and only novel, The Greater Hope, in 1948, has highlighted displacement, estrangement, and a sharp skepticism toward...

Two men talk in Tokyo. One, a Belgian, is a diplomat. The other, Dutch, is a photographer. What, they wonder, is the real face of Japan? How can they get beyond the European idea of the nation and its people--with its exoticism--and see Japan as it truly is? The Belgian has an idea: he helps the photographer find a model to shoot in front of Mount Fuji as the -typical Japanese.- The plan works better than either had imagined--in fact, it works too well: the photographer falls in love, neglects his friend and his career, and, feeling out of place and disillusioned in Holland, returns to Japan...

Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters has been called his "most enjoyable novel" by the New York Review of Books. It's a wild satire that takes place almost entirely in front of Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man, on display in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, as two typically Viennese pedants (serving as alter egos for Bernhard himself) irreverently, even contemptuously take down high culture, society, state-supported artists, Heidegger, and much more.

It's a book built on thought and conversation rather than action or visuals. Yet somehow celebrated Austrian cartoonist Nicholas...

Few writers have ever experienced such a steady rise in their reputation and public profile as Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) has seen in recent years. As more of his previously little known work has been translated into English, readers have discovered a unique writer whose off-kilter sensibility and innovations in form are perfectly suited to our fragmented, distracted, bewildered era.

This book brings English-language readers work by Walser in yet another form: dramolette. The short plays presented here, inspired by the German theater Walser enjoyed in his youth, while never...

Austrian poet and playwright Ernst Jandl died in 2000, leaving behind his partner, poet Friederike Mayrocker--and bringing to an end a half century of shared life, and shared literary work. Mayrocker immediately began attempting to come to terms with his death in the way that poets struggling with loss have done for millennia: by writing.
?Requiem for Ernst Jandl is the powerfully moving outcome. In this quiet but passionate lament that grows into a song of enthralling intensity, Mayrocker recalls memories and shared experiences, and--with the sudden, piercing perception of...