Jurek Becker (1937-1997) is best known for his novel "Jacob the Liar", which follows the life of a man, who, like Becker, lived in the Lodz ghetto during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. Throughout his career, Becker also wrote nonfic...

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is recognized as one of post-war German literature's most important novelists, poets, and playwrights. Influenced by Hans Weigel and the legendary literary circle Gruppe 47, Bachmann gained international renown for her p...

Close to death, an old man collapses and struggles to his bed. The sounds of the endless night unsettle him, triggering images, questions, and memories. In What Darkness Was, Inka Parei, author of The Shadow-Boxing Woman, allows the reader to inhabit...

This screenplay by Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch was developed from an episode in his 1964 novel "Gantenbein", or "A Wilderness of Mirrors". At the center of both works is Theo Ehrismann, a man who cannot seem to change his life no matter...

Alexander Kluge's work has long grappled with the Third Reich and its aftermath, and the extermination of the Jews forms its gravitational center. Kluge is forever reminding us to keep our present catastrophes in perspective – "calibrated" – against...

The world's most powerful man, Qianlong, emperor of China, invites the famous eighteenth-century clockmaker Alister Cox to his court in Beijing. There, in the heart of the Forbidden City, the Englishman and his assistants are to build machines that m...

The Federmanns live a pleasant but painfully normal life in the Munich suburbs. All that the three children really know about money is that there's never enough of it in their family.   Every so often, their impish Great-Aunt Fe descends on the city....

In "The Atlas of an Anxious Man", Christoph Ransmayr offers a mesmerizing travel diary – a sprawling tale of earthly wonders seen by a wandering eye. This is an exquisite, lyrically told travel story. Translated by Simon Pare, this unique account fol...

"Porcelain" is a book-length cycle of forty-nine poems written over the course of more than a decade that together serve as a lament for Durs Grunbein's hometown, Dresden, which was destroyed in the Allied firebombing of February 1945. The book is at...

Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek is known as a writer who works in response to contemporary crises and cultural phenomena. Perhaps none of her works display that quality as clearly as "On the Royal Road". Three weeks after Donald Trump's election,...