This collection of High Modernism among Austrian and German writers includes: --Pogrom and a selection from The Case of Sergeant Grischa by Arnold Zweig--"The Murder of a Buttercup" and a selection from Berlin Alexanderplatz (recently cited as one of the 100 Most Meaningful Books of All Time in a survey that was reported in The Guardian, and made into a landmark multipart television series by Rainer Werner Fassbinder) by Alfred Doblin--Selections from Jew Snss and The Oppermans by Lion Feuchtwanger--A selection from The Seventh Cross and "Excursion of the Dead Girls" by Anna Seghers

Here for the first time in English is Alfred Doblin's astonishing epic of eighteenth century China, hailed on its publication in 1915 as a master-piece of Expressionist prose, and since recognized to be the first modern German novel. The Three Leaps of Wang Lun is the story of a doomed sectarian rebellion during the reign of Emperor Ch'ien-lung (1736-1796). It is also the most sustained evocation, in any European language, of a China untouched by the West. Doblin's imagination, almost hallucinatory in its intensity, brings this China to vivid life. Teeming cities and Tibetan wastes,...