Doppelgangers, a murderer s guilt, pulp noir, fanatical police, and impossible romancesthese are the pieces from which German master Wolfgang Hilbig builds a divided nation battling its demons. Delving deep into the psyches of both East and West Germany, "The Sleep of the Righteous" reveals a powerful, apocalyptic account of the century-defining nation s trajectory from 1945 to 1989. From a youth in a war-scarred industrial town to wearying labor as a factory stoker, surreal confrontations with the Stasi, and, finally, a conflicted escape to the West, Hilbig creates a cipher that is at once...

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...