A novel from the author of The Radetzky March, "considered by many to be one of the most important Jewish voices in German literature written between the two wars" ( The Forward).From Joseph Roth, an allegorical yet decidedly modern novelist, comes this story of postwar disillusion, the limits of faith, and "personal fate as governed by the blind, casual workings of a machine controlled by no one and for which no one is responsible" ( The New ...

Wolfgang Koeppen’s postwar masterpiece in a luminous new translation by the poet Michael HofmannPigeons on the Grass is told over a single day in Munich in 1948. The first new cinemas and insurance offices are opening atop the ruins, Korea and Persia are keeping the world in panic, planes rumble in the sky (but no one looks up), newspaper headlines announce war over oil and atomic bomb tests. Odysseus Cotton, a black man, alights at the station and hires a porter; ...

Kully knows some things you don’t learn at school. She knows the right way to roll a cigarette and pack a suitcase. She knows that cars are more dangerous than lions. She knows you can’t enter a country without a passport or visa. And she knows that she and her parents can’t go back to Germany again – her father’s books are banned there. But there are also things she doesn’t understand, like why there might be a war in Europe – just that there are men named Hitler, Mussolini and Chamberlai...

Rilke, Sachs, Brecht, Celan: German has produced some of the giants of 20th century European poetry. In this new selection, complete with many new translations, Michael Hofmann guides us through the poems, poets and themes of German verse. Meticulously researched but eminently approachable, The Faber Book of Twentieth Century German Poems is an essential new addition to any poetry bookshelf.'Michael Hofmann has a skeptical intelligence, an observant eye, a compulsi...

Habermas’s Public Sphere: A Critique analyzes the evolution of Juergen Habermas’s social and political theory from the 1950s to the present by focusing on the explicit and on the tacit changes in his thinking about The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, his global academic bestseller, which has been translated into 30 languages. Integrating “public sphere,” “discourse,” and “reason,” the three categories at the center of his lifelong work as a scholar and as a public intellect...

Reading Habermas: Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere dissolves Habermas’s monolithic stylization to precisely access his seminal distinction between the purely political polis of antiquity, which excludes the private economy from the res publica, and the modern public sphere with its rational-critical discourse about commodity exchange and social labor in the political economy. Deconstructing the uniform mold of Structural Transformation’s narrative about a rise and fall of the...

“In a brilliant translation of this great German novel, Michael Hofmann has illuminated a dark corner of recent European history. A forgotten masterpiece.”—Evening StandardDeath in Rome tells the story of four members of a German family—a former SS officer, a young man preparing for the priesthood, a composer, and a government administrator—reunited by chance in the decaying beauty of postwar Rome. A chilling account of Nazis after the war, here t...

Peter Stamm's best-selling debut novel, Agnes, now available for the first time in paperback.“Write a story about me,” Agnes said to her lover, “so I know what you think of me.” So he started to write the story of everything that had happened to them from the moment they met.At first, he works with Agnes to create a narrative that is most true to life, but as time passes and he grows more enamored with the narrative he has begun, he continues writi...

An adventure with a roving genius of literary criticismMichael Hofmann—poet, translator, and intellectual vagabond—has established himself as one of the keenest critics of contemporary literature. Safely nestled between the covers of Where Have You Been?, he offers a hand to guide us and an encouraging whisper in our ear, leading us on a trip through what to read, how to think, and why to like. And while these essays bear sharp insights that will help us re...

On the anniversary of Wolfgang Koeppen’s 120th year, the two remaining works in his postwar trilogy in Michael Hofmann’s spectacular translationThe Hothouse traces the tragic final two days in the life of a minor German politician, Keetenheuve, a man disillusioned by the corruption of his country after World War II. Following his self-imposed exile during the war, Keetenheuve returns to the hothouse: the city of Bonn, the capital of that new postwar capita...

A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War, Russia 1941-44 is the haunting memoir of a young German soldier on the Russian front during World War II.Willy Peter Reese was only twenty years old when he found himself marching through Russia with orders to take no prisoners. Three years later he was dead.Bearing witness to--and participating in--the atrocities of war, Reese recorded his reflections in his diary, leaving behind an intelligent, touching,...

Written by the eminent poet Michael Hofmann, this approachable and companionable book offers readings of four poems on the subject of boats. Based on Michael Hofmann's Clarendon lectures, this volume offers readings of four poems in German, French, Italian, and English, by Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, Eugenio Montale, and Karen Solie. All four poems are on the subject of boats: 'Emigrant Ship', the 'Bateau Ivre', 'Boats on the Marne', and 'The World'. The volume sug...