A beautiful collection of the legendary thinker’s short storiesThe Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebr...

An investigation of the cultures and technologies of early radio and how a generation of cultural operators—with Schoen at the center—addressed crisis and adversity.Dials, knobs, microphones, clocks; heads, hands, breath, voices. Ernst Schoen joined Frankfurt Radio in the 1920s as programmer and accelerated the potentials of this collision of bodies and technologies. As with others of his generation, Schoen experienced crisis after crisis, from the violence of war,...

**INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER: This “absolute gem of a book” offers a month-by-month account of the year before World War I—one of the most exciting times in the 20th century (The Observer).“A sexy, comic and occasionally heartbreaking soap opera” for history buffs interested in 20th-century art, music, and literature (Washington Post).**It was the year Henry Ford first put a conveyer belt in his car factory, and the year Louis Armstrong first picked up a tru...

**How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more?This internationally acclaimed revelatory history—"filled with first-person accounts from articles and diaries" (The *New York Times)—*of the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust.Featuring over 40 eye-opening black-and-white photographs a...

At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself; these profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for writers and artists of all kinds. This book also contains the 'Letter from a Young Worker', a striking polemic against Christianity written in letter-form, near the end of Rilke's life. In Lewis Hyde's introduction, he explores t...

Twenty years in the making, this sweeping masterpiece charts Berlin through the rise of Nazism.During the past two decades, Jason Lutes has quietly created one of the masterworks of the graphic novel golden age. Berlin is one of the high-water marks of the medium: rich in its well-researched historical detail, compassionate in its character studies, and as timely as ever in its depiction of a society slowly awakening to the stranglehold of fascism....

**The diaries of the acclaimed author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—provide a penetrating look into Prague and the life and dreams of one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.These diaries cover the years 1910 to 1923, the year before Kafka’s death at the age of forty. They provide a look into Kafka’s accounts of his dreams, his feelings for the father he worshipped and the woman ...

In 1996, in the middle of watching an ill-tempered football match between England and Germany, Philip Oltermann's parents tell him that they are going to leave their home city Hamburg behind and move to London.Inspired by his own experience of both countries, Philip Oltermann looks at eight historical encounters between English and German people from the last two hundred years: Helmut Kohl tries to explain German cuisine to the Iron Lady, the Mini plays catch-up with the Volkswagen...

While his old furniture rots in storage, Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris, with little but a library reader's card to distinguish him from the city's untouchables. Every person he sees seems to carry their death with them, and he thinks of the deaths, and ghosts, of his aristocratic family, of which only he remains. The only novel by one of the greatest writers of poetry in German, the semi-autobiographical Notebooks is an uneasy, compelling and poetic book that...

This chronicle of renowned composer Richard Wagner and his descendants features "a cast of characters who are positively operatic in their histrionics" ( The Guardian).Richard Wagner was many things—composer, philosopher, philanderer, failed revolutionary, and virulent anti-Semite—and his descendants have carried on his complex legacy.In his "lively and wry" history of the legendary composer and his family, biographer Jonathan Carr also offers fasc...

"[Joseph Roth] is now recognized as one of the twentieth century's great writers."—Anthony Heilbut, Los Angeles Times Book ReviewThe Joseph Roth revival has finally gone mainstream with the thunderous reception for What I Saw, a book that has become a classic with five hardcover printings. Glowingly reviewed, What I Saw introduces a new generation to the genius of this tortured author with its "nonstop brilliance, irresistible charm and continuing relevan...

A SPECTATOR, NEW STATESMAN AND THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR'The best biography I have read in years' Philippe Sands'Spectacular' Observer**'A remarkable portrait'**GuardianW. G. Sebald was one of the most extraordinary and influential writers of the twentieth century. Through books including The E...