Komotau, the Czech Republic, late summer, 1945. Four women – seventy-year-old Johanna, her two daughters Hanna and Maria, and Hanna's daughter Anna – are ordered by the new Czech authorities to leave their homes and assemble with other Germans at the...

"we find ourselves deep in the future of fairy tale. we are the offspring of our own imaginings" Ulrike Almut Sandig's second volume of poems to be translated into English is a journey through a world that is imaginary yet entirely recognizable. Pre...

Exploring longing, lust for life, ageing, mortality, grief, and flowers in her inimitable late style, etudes is a diary-like sequence of poems by one of the greatest living Austrian poets. Friederike Mayrocker's almost daily entries give us a unique...

Is it possible to fight for social justice if you've never really loved another person? Can you save a country if you're in love? Forty-six-year-old Anton Stover's marriage is broken. His affairs are a thing of the past, and his career at the univer...

On October 5, 2012, the German national newspaper Die Welt published its daily issue – but things looked... different. Quieter. The sensations of the day, forgotten as soon as they're read, were missing, replaced with an unprecedented calm, extracted...

For much of her career, Elfriede Jelinek has been maligned in the press for both her unrelenting critique of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. Despite this, her central role in shaping contempora...

"I think in pictures. Poems help me with this. They are like buoys in the sea. I swim to them, from one to the other. In between, without them, I am lost. They are the handholds where something masses together in the infinite expanse" – Anselm Kiefer...

"I enjoyed success too early, married the wrong man, and hung out with the wrong people; too many men have liked me, and I've liked too many men". Frank and refreshing, Brigitte Reimann's collected diaries provide a candid account of life in social...

When a young reader once asked Franz Fuhmann if he considered his work to be science fiction, he was quick to deny it: he wanted nothing to do with the genre. As he began writing the stories that make up this volume, however, he found himself coming...

Paul Celan (1920-1970) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is recognized as one of pos...