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,...

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...