Famous as the libretto for Antonín Dvorák’s opera of the same name, Jaroslav Kvapil’s poem Rusalka is an intriguing work of literature on its own. Directly inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s famous “The Little Mermaid,” Kvapil’s reinterpretation adds an array of nuanced poetic techniques, a more dramatic tempo, and dark undertones that echo the work of eminent Czech folklorist Karel Jaromír Erben. All of these influences work in tandem to create a poetic work that is familiar y...

The classic pacifist novel by a major Polish writer, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize At the beginning of the twentieth century the villagers of the Carpathian mountains lead a simple life, much as they have always done. The modern world has yet to reach the inhabitants of this remote region of the Habsburg Empire. Among them is Piotr, a bandy-legged peasant, who wants nothing more from life than an official railway cap, a cottage, and a bride with a dowry. But then the First World Wa...

This memoir of a Soviet POW's escape from a Nazi concentration camp is a remarkable account of cruelty and courage during WWII.On November 6, 1942, seventy Soviet prisoners of war staged an extraordinary mass escape from Auschwitz. Among the escapees was prisoner number 1418, Andrey Pogozhev. One of the few who managed to evade the pursuing Nazi guards, Pogozhev lived to tell his story in this singular chronicle of wartime survival.Pogozhev was caught by th...

One of the great war memoirs, now featuring a foreword by the New York Times bestselling author of Matterhorn in time for the centenary of World War I and the Battle of the SommeA worldwide bestseller published shortly after the end of World War I, Storm of Steel is a memoir of astonishing power, savagery, and ashen lyricism. Itilluminates not only the horrors but also the fascination of total war, as seen through the eyes of an ordinary ...

A grunt’s-eye report from the battlefield in the spirit of The Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet *on the Western Front—*the only known account by a common soldier of the campaigns of Napoleon’s Grand Army between 1806 and 1813.When eighteen-year-old German stonemason Jakob Walter was conscripted into the Grand Army of Napoleon, he had no idea of the trials that lay ahead. The long, grueling marches in Prussia and Poland sacrificed countless men to Bonaparte’s gra...

A Hungarian artist’s haunting WWI memoir of the Eastern Front, executed with a painter’s eye for color, detail, and heartbreaking symbolism“[A] compact self-portrait against a background of carnage and disillusionment.” —The New York TimesThe budding young Hungarian artist Béla Zombory-Moldován was on holiday when the First World War broke out in July 1914. Called up by the army, he soon found himself hundreds of miles away, advanc...

Lesley Blanch was four when the mysterious Traveller first blew into her nursery, swathed in Siberian furs and full of the fairytales of Russia. She was twenty when he swept out of her life, leaving her love-lorne and in the grips of a passionate obsession. The search to recapture the love of her life, and the Russia that he had planted within her, takes her to Siberia and beyond, journeying deep into the romantic terrain of the mind's eye. Part travel book, part love story, Lesley Blanch'...

The first overview of all Joseph Roth’s journalism: traveling across a Europe in crisis, he declares,“I am a hotel citizen, a hotel patriot.”The Hotel Years gathers sixty-four feuilletons: on hotels; pains and pleasures; personalities; and the deteriorating international situation of the 1930s. Never before translated into English, these pieces begin in Vienna just at the end of the First World War, and end in Paris near the outbreak of the Second World Wa...

This is the contemporary account of Jakob Walter, a Westphalian conscript in Napoleons Grande Armée. Walter took part in the Emperors campaigns against Prussia, Austria and finally, the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. This is what it really meant to march with the Emperor. This volume is illustrated throughout with the watercolours produced by Albrecht Adam, another German who served in the ranks of Napoleons armies, who witnessed many of the same scenes as Jakob Walter. Together the ...

A Polish man recounts his heartbreaking search for his family after Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia invaded Poland in World War II.This is a unique personal story of the horrors of Stalin's invasion of Poland, through the eyes of 14-year-old Telesfor Sobierajski. He tells of his epic journey the rough Siberia in search of his family and their flight from Stalinist Russia.

Shortly after the execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Dervla Murphy travelled to Romania and found a nation both exhilarated and bewildered by revolution. Eager to explore a country that had hitherto been inaccessible to outsiders, Murphy describes in lucid detail a journey on two planes: cycling and ambling through the rural Carpathians, and exploring the mind-set of a post-Communist society in the grips of an identity crisis. She is treated to tremendous hospitality wherever she goes, and in...

Joseph Strauss (a dentist and bachelor, client of the Eleven Titties brothel and of Der Große Bär beer cellar) leaves Prussia in the spring of 1866 and follows a captain of dragoons to Bucharest, where the officer is to ascend the throne as prince of the United Principalities of Romania. War is imminent in central Europe, but the company of a special tomcat, a guardian angel of sorts, helps him to overcome all dangers.In Bucharest, Joseph will meet and fall in love with an attractiv...