Sputnik, the Virgin Mary, a murder...In the secluded Eastern European village of Baia Luna, life orbits around church, work, home and the pub. This is very much the case for fifteen-year-old Pavel Botev - that is, until the seismic shift of world politics is felt even in his small community. When Communist party officials arrive and claim Baia Luna for the Soviet Union, Pavel's schoolteacher commits grisly suicide. Piecing together her diaries, P...

Appearing together in English for the first time, two masterpieces that take on the jazz age, the Nuremburg trials, postwar commercialism, and the feat of writing a book, presented in one brilliant volumeThe Death of My Brother Abel and its delirious sequel, Cain, constitute the magnum opus of Gregor von Rezzori’s prodigious career, the most ambitious, extravagant, outrageous, and deeply considered achievement of this wildly original and never les...

In 1935 Paris, the French Communist Party faces a surreal dilemma: Moscow demands a black African delegate for its upcoming Festival of Peace, but none can be found—until a flamboyant vaudeville performer named Luciano di Lammermoor unexpectedly fits the part.With wit and quiet precision, Michael Kleeberg turns a historical farce into a pointed meditation on identity, ideology

"I'm stunned by the silence," says Martin Roth - which is why he chose to conduct these conversations with his three adult children. The great European Martin Roth is convinced that animated discourse between people of different generations is one way of effectively thwarting the crisis of societal values; a way to rebuild trust in the awareness of one's own history and to pass this on to future generations. The result is an inspiring plea for an open, tolerant coexistence in a Europe in w...

An award-winning journalist transforms his lifelong fascination with the world of the Gypsies into fiction with this exuberant, deeply enchanting debut novel—both whimsical and suspenseful—winner of the European Book Prize, and translated into more than a dozen languages worldwide.November 1957: As Communism spreads across Eastern Europe, strange events are beginning to upend daily life in Baia Luna, a tiny village nestled at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. As the Soviets rac...

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice SelectionNamed one of the Best Books of the Year by the Economist and Kirkus ReviewsThis “splendid biography” (Wall Street Journal) of Goethe presents his life and work as an essential touchstone for the modern age.A masterful intellectual portrait, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is celebrated as the seminal twenty-first-century biography of the ...

After observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt formulated her controversial concept of the 'banality of evil' and asked the question: how can seemingly normal people carry out genocidal acts? She found her answer by focusing on the machinery of Nazi genocide and the organizational capacity of the victims: the Jewish Councils drawing up lists for deportation. The latter proved hugely controversial when the book was first published in serial form in the New Yorke...

In 1934, Veza Taubner and Elias Canetti were married in Vienna. Elias describes the arrangement to his brother Georges as a “functional” marriage. Meanwhile, an intense intellectual love affair develops between Veza and Georges, a young doctor suffering fromtuberculosis. Four years later, Veza and Elias flee Nazi-ruled Vienna to London, where they lead an impoverished and extremely complicated marital life in exile.Spanning the major part of Elias’s struggle for literary recognition...

Gustav Rubin, a fur dealer in Vienna, flies to New York to spend the summer with his wife and two young children in a lake house north of the city. When he arrives late at JFK, he is met by his opinionated, unrelenting mother, Rosa. They rent a car and set out for Lake Gilead. But Gustav loses his way, and son and mother end up on the wrong side of the river. Trying to find the right route north, they become trapped on the Tappan Zee Bridge in the traffic jam of all traffic jams–a truck tr...

This sterling biography of Germany's greatest writer presents Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as if we are seeing him for the first time.The work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe has reverberated through two and a half centuries, altering the course of literature in ways both grand and intimate. No other writer so completely captivated the intellectual life of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, putting into language the anxieties and ambitions of a civil...