"Twilight of the Idols" presents a vivid, compressed overview of many of Nietzsche s mature ideas, including his attack on Plato s Socrates and on the Platonic legacy in Western philosophy and culture. Polt provides a trustworthy rendering of Nietzsche s text in contemporary American English, complete with notes prepared by the translator and Tracy Strong. An authoritative Introduction by Strong makes this an outstanding edition. Select Bibliography and Index."

At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering, and the nature of advice itself. These profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for generations of writers and artists of all kinds, including Lady Gaga and Patti Smith. With honesty, elegance, and a deep understanding of the loneliness that often comes with being an artist, Rilke's...

First published in 1963, in East Germany, They Divided the Sky tells the story of a young couple, living in the new, socialist, East Germany, whose relationship is tested to the extreme not only because of the political positions they gradually develop but, very concretely, by the Berlin Wall, which went up on August 13, 1961.

The story is set in 1960 and 1961, a moment of high political cold war tension between the East Bloc and the West, a time when many thousands of people were leaving the young German Democratic Republic (the GDR) every day in order to seek better lives in...

HEINRICH BOLL (1917-85) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972. He was one of the most outspoken of literary figures, "The Conscience of Germany" if not the West, in speaking upon the hypocrisies of both denazification and the wonder of German economic recovery during the 1950s. A wounded soldier himself, Boll was a champion of individual rights over the authority of the State.

The year he won the Nobel Prize, there were also calls to revoke the award following Boll's article in Der Spiegel in defense of the constitutional rights or a terrorist group.

Essays...