This collection of 11 essays by leading literary studies and cultural studies scholars examines the double meaning of the word forge - to create or to form, on the one hand, and to make falsely, on the other. The scholars take on a broad range of topics, including the falsified Hitler diaries, the creation of national identity in Bohemia, and Jean-Etienne Liotard's fraudulent Turkish identity. Each essay asks how forgery - at once the work of a criminal and a master - has shaped modern culture and challenged our understandings of authorship and value.

Judith Ryan traces Rilke's development from aestheticism to modernism, paying special attention to the way his work engages with other poetry and the visual arts. Taking a skeptical view of Rilke's own myth of himself as a solitary genius, Ryan shows how deeply his writing is embedded in the culture of its day. Rilke is now the most widely-read and influential German-language poet, and this study is full of surprising discoveries about his innovative and often profoundly moving poems.

Gü nter Grass, Edward Dimendberg on Holocaust memorials.

"Animals in our World" celebrates in poems and photos the variety of animals that share our world. All the animals in this book I've "met" personally. Each encounter I had was a little adventure that made my life richer.