Miriam's Book is about a young Jewish woman's traumatic experiences in WW2 and subsequently her child's exposure to her post-traumatic stress disorder. While much of this narrative poem or verse novella is based on historical events, the fictional parts and the dislocations of syntax and temporal sequence aim to convey the terrifying uncertainty and disorientation suffered by victims of war and flight.

'This is a quite remarkable book, a pleasure to read. Not only is it clear and informative but also by turns witty, melancholic and insightful. The book is astonishingly erudite, but wears this learning so lightly and so charmingly that it is both easy and gripping to read.' Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of LondonPenelope waits by her loom for Odysseus, Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot, all of us have to wait: for buses, phone calls and the kettle to boil. But d...

This is a book of meditative reading. Each of the sixty-one aphoristic entries aims to interpret Rilke’s poetry as a musician might play Debussy’s Clair de lune, to transpose into the key of language the song, the melody, and the refrain of Rilke’s gentle disposition: his recognition of the transience of things; his acknowledgment of the vulnerability and fragility of people, animals, and flowers; his empathy toward those who suffer.The cut flowers gently laid out on the g...

Lingering and its decried equivalents, such as dawdling, idling, loafing, or lolling about, are both shunned and coveted in our culture where time is money and where there is never quite enough of either. Is lingering lazy? Is it childish? Boring? Do poets linger? (Is that why poetry is boring?) Is it therapeutic? Should we linger more? Less? What happens when we linger? Harold Schweizer here examines an experience of time that, though common, usually passes unnoticed.Drawing on a ...

Rarity is a quality by which things flowers, leaves, light, sound fleetingly appear and disappear, leaving in their wake a resonance of something we just thought we had glimpsed. Each of the nine chapters in this book pursues such intimations of rarity in poetic ideas, images, and silences.

Appearing for the first time in English, this masterful novel by one of the foremost figures of postwar German literature is an indelible portrait of Nazism slowly overtaking and poisoning a small town. Semi-autobiographical, it is also a remarkably vivid account of a childhood fraught with troubles, yet full of remembered love and touched by miracle.In a provincial town on Lake Constance, Johann basks in the affection of the colorful staff and regulars at the Station Restaurant. T...

A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceFor eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. "With bald honesty and brutal lyricism" (Elle), the anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. "Spare and unpredictable, minutely observed and utt...

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'Why did I survive when so many others did not?'Otto was just nine years old when his family was captured in Berlin. All around him, Sinti and Roma families were being torn from their homes and broken up, many of them disappearing altogether.When Otto arrived in Auschwitz, he, as so many others, suffered unimaginable humiliation and suffering, and witnessed horrific violence and dehumanisation of his fe...

Unlock the more straightforward side of Reunion with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!This engaging summary presents an analysis of Reunion by Fred Uhlman, which begins its story in pre-war Germany and developing against the background of Hitler’s rise to power. It tells the story of two teenagers, Hans and Conrad, whose profound friendship is pulled apart by the Nazi regime and its toxic ideas. The heartbreaking novella explores t...

Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation by Chantal Wright is a hybrid text, innovatively combining literary criticism, experimental translation, and scholarly commentary. This work centres on a German-language prose text by Yoko Tawada entitled ‘Portrait of a Tongue’ [‘Porträt einer Zunge’, 2002]. Yoko Tawada is a native speaker of Japanese who learned German as an adult.Portrait of a Tongue is a portrait of a German woman...

A masterful new novel from the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize, hailed for depicting the "landscape of the dispossessed" with "the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose" (Nobel Prize Committee)It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the...

This "witty and droll" collection of philosophical tweets from the popular @NeinQuarterly offers a "perfect antidote to relentless positivity" ( Publishers Weekly)."Rome didn't burn in a day." — Nein. A ManifestoEric Jarosinski is the self-described "failed intellectual" behind @NeinQuarterly, a "Compendium of Utopian Negation" that uses the aphoristic potential of Twitter to plumb the existential abyss of modern life. In Nein. A Manif...