Search results for ""author michael hofmann""

A number of the poems in this collection by Michael Hofmann show him returning to the subject of his father, the German novelist Gert Hofmann, whose relationship with his son was also the principal subject of his celebrated 1986 collection, Acrimony, and of a memorable television documentary that appeared at that time. In 1993, however, Gert Hofmann died, and the poems written since then replace the combativeness and acerbity of the earlier book with a more complex tone: frankness and factuality are still important elements, but they are tempered now by grief, pity, pain and bemusement.Readers will note other differences, too: among them, a greater sense of formal freedom, a more flowing and abundant style of poetic discourse, an ever-sharper receptiveness to brilliant and brittle observations, and an increasing variety of tones, from the droll to the remorseful and the delirious. Above all, they will be delighted to learn that Michael Hofmann, whose outstanding talents were evident from his very first collection has found ways of putting them at the service of a more mature, profound and revelatory view of the world.

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Acrimony touches on personal and political watersheds and examines various kinds of patrimony. It is characterized by a drastic honesty, and rhythmic force.

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The first poem in Gottfried Benn's first book, Morgue (1912) - written in an hour, published in a week, and notorious ever after, or so the poet claimed - with its scandalous closing image of an aster sewn into a corpse by a playful medical student, set him on his celebrated path. And indeed, mortality, flowers, and powerful aesthetic collisions typify much of Benn's subsequent work.Over decades, as he suffered the vicissitudes of an often hostile fate - the death of his mother from untreated cancer; the death of his first wife Edith in 1922; his brief but disastrous attempt to ingratiate himself with the Nazis in 1933, followed by their persecution of him; the suicide of his second wife Herta in 1945, afraid she would fall into the hands of the Russians - the harsh, sometimes callous voice of the poems relented, softened, and mellowed. The later Benn - from which Impromptus is chiefly drawn, many of the poems translated into English for the first time - is deeply affecting: the routines and sorrows and meditations of an intelligent, pessimistic, and experienced man. Written in what T. S. Eliot called the 'third voice' of poetry, the low un-upholstered monologue of the poet talking to himself, these poems are slender ribbons of speech on the naked edge of song and silence.With this new collection of poems selected and translated by Michael Hofmann, Gottfired Benn, at long last, promises to attain in English the presence and importance that he so richly deserves.

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A new selection of essays from Michael Hofmann - one of our most exceptional critics of contemporary literature. 'Superb and invigorating.' Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily TelegraphIn these thirty essays, Hofmann brings his signature wit and sustained critical mastery to a poetic, penetrating, and candid discussion of the writers and artists of the last hundred years. Here are the indispensable poets without which contemporary poetry would be unimaginable - Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and the man he calls the greatest English poet since Shakespeare, Ted Hughes. But he also illumines the despair of John Berryman and the antics of poetry's bogeyman, Frederick Seidel. In essays on art that are themselves works of art, Hofmann's agile and brilliant mind explores a panoply of subjects from the mastery of translation to the best day job for a poet. Where Have You Been? is an unmissable journey with literature's most irresistible flaneur. At the same time, it is a story of love between a reader and his treasured books.

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Michael Hofmann is renowned as one of our most brilliant critics and translators; that he is also regarded as among our most respected poets - 'one of the definitive bodies of work of the last half-century', TLS - is all the more impressive for his relatively concentrated output. One Lark, One Horse will be his fifth collection of poems since his debut in 1983, and his first since Approximately Nowhere in 1999. But it is also one of the most anticipated gatherings of new work in years. In style, it is as unmistakable as ever: sometimes funny, sometimes caustic; world-facing and yet intimate; and shows a bright mind burning fiercely over the European imagination. Approaching his sixtieth birthday, the poet explores where he finds himself, geographically and in life, treating with wit and compassion such universal themes as ageing and memory, place, and the difficulty for the individual to exist at all in an ever bigger and more bestial world. One Lark,

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Michael Hofmann is renowned as one of our most brilliant critics and translators; that he is also regarded as among our most respected poets - 'one of the definitive bodies of work of the last half-century', TLS - is all the more impressive for his relatively concentrated output. One Lark, One Horse will be his fifth collection of poems since his debut in 1983, and his first since Approximately Nowhere in 1999. But it is also one of the most anticipated gatherings of new work in years. In style, it is as unmistakable as ever: sometimes funny, sometimes caustic; world-facing and yet intimate; and shows a bright mind burning fiercely over the European imagination. Approaching his sixtieth birthday, the poet explores where he finds himself, geographically and in life, treating with wit and compassion such universal themes as ageing and memory, place, and the difficulty for the individual to exist at all in an ever bigger and more bestial world. One Lark, One Horse is a remarkable assembly of work that will delight loyal readers and enchant new ones with its approachable, companionable voice.

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Michael Hofmann's poems have been widely admired, notably for their gift of compressed and vividly pointed reportage, and the collision course of words and dictions that his poetry characteristically provokes. His subject-matter has been equally individual, including his remarkable and complex series of 'father-poems', his subtle portraiture of the lives of others, East and West, together with his acerbic impressionism of contemporary England, and his exploration of Adorno's injunction that 'it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home'.

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Michael Hofmann, a much-praised contributor to Poetry Introduction 5, was born in Germany in 1957 but brought up in Britain. Nights in the Iron Hotel, which won the author a Cholmondeley Award in 1984, is his first full-length volume. Hofmann's poems are marked by a classical authority, a formidable ironic intelligence, wide-ranging subject matter and a unique tone of voice. 'You move the fifty-seven muscles it takes to smile,' Hofmann writes in a poem whose subject is sexual tension - and immediately the reader recognises a world in which emotions are not the usual poetic counters but something truer, more complex and more painful. This quality of disenchantment is served by a deceptively laconic style of measured brio.

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Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant and successful poet to emerge from the former East Germany, a place where, he wrote, 'the best refuge was a closed mouth.' In unsettling, often funny, sometimes savage lines whose vivid images reflect his deep love for and connection with the visual arts, Grünbein is reinventing German poetry and taking on the most pressing moral concerns of his generation. Brilliantly edited and translated by Michael Hofmann, The Selected Poems of Durs Grünbein introduces Germany's most highly acclaimed contemporary poet to a British audience.'Grünbein is a truly cosmopolitan poet . . . creating poetry which, however subtly, participates in and facilitates Germany's sustained attempts to reconfigurating and redefining itself in post-Cold War Europe.' Michael Eskin, Times Literary Supplement

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After returning from a pleasant holiday with his wife, Astrid, and their two children, Thomas walks out the front door. Thomas walks up the street. Thomas keeps walking. Astrid gradually realizes that her husband has not just gotten up early to go to work. She waits for as long as she can and then puts as much energy as she can into trying to find him - coming to understand, along the way, that there is little she can do if Thomas is striving to stay lost. In precise and hypnotic prose that cuts as cleanly as a scalpel, To the Back of Beyond is a novel that takes away the safe foundations of a marriage and a lifestyle to ask deeper questions about identity, connection and how free we are to change our lives. It is a graceful and resonant work from one of Europe's most important writers.

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A superb new translation by Michael Hofmann of some of Kafka's most frightening and visionary short fictionStrange beasts, night terrors, absurd bureaucrats and sinister places abound in this collection of stories by Franz Kafka. Some are less than a page long, others more substantial; all were unpublished in his lifetime. These matchless short works range from the gleeful miniature horror 'Little Fable' to the off-kilter humour of 'Investigations of a Dog', and from the elaborate waking nightmare of 'Building the Great Wall of China' to the creeping unease of 'The Burrow', where a nameless creature's labyrinthine hiding place turns into a trap of fear and paranoia.

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'It was what we call in the trade a potato...' Tales of low-lifes and grifters trying to make ends meet in pre-War Germany.Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

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This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka’s works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka’s eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka’s literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.

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Darkly funny, searingly honest short stories from Hans Fallada, author of bestselling Alone in BerlinIn these stories, criminals lament how hard it is to scrape a living by breaking and entering; families measure their daily struggles in marks and pfennigs; a convict makes a desperate leap from a moving train; a ring - and with it a marriage - is lost in a basket of potatoes.Here, as in his novels, Fallada is by turns tough, darkly funny, streetwise and effortlessly engaging, writing with acute feeling about ordinary lives shaped by forces larger than themselves: addiction, love, money.

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The great novel of 1920s Berlin life, in a superb new translation by Michael HofmannFranz Biberkopf is back on the streets of Berlin. Determined to go straight after a stint in prison, he finds himself thwarted by an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate. Cheated, humiliated, thrown from a moving car; embroiled in an underworld of pimps, thugs, drunks and prostitutes, Franz picks himself up over and over again - until one day he is struck a monstrous blow which might just prove his final downfall.A dazzling collage of newspaper reports, Biblical stories, drinking songs and urban slang, Berlin Alexanderplatz is the great novel of Berlin life: inventing, styling and recreating the city as reality and dream; mimicking its movements and rhythms; immortalizing its pubs, abattoirs, apartments and chaotic streets. From the gutter to the stars, this is the whole picture of the city.Berlin Alexanderplatz brought fame in 1929 to its author Alfred Döblin, until then an impecunious writer and doctor in a working-class neighbourhood in the east of Berlin. Success at home was short-lived, however; Doblin, a Jew, left Germany the day after the Reichstag Fire in 1933, and did not return until 1945. This landmark translation by Michael Hofmann is the first to do justice to Berlin Alexanderplatz in English, brilliantly capturing the energy, prodigality and inventiveness of Döblin's masterpiece.

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The legendary Austro-Hungarian novelist and essayist, Joseph Roth, was born in Ukraine in 1894 and died tragically in Paris in 1939. These letters span the breadth of Roth's life, from the schoolboy to the veteran of 44, marked by war, poverty, alcoholism, the loss of his wife through madness, and two decades of prolific work. It is a deeply moving portrait of the life of the writer as an outsider, in exile from a world he no longer recognized as his own.

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In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets in our literature.John Berryman (1914-72) was a poet from an immensely gifted generation of American poets that included Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Bishop. His long sequence The Dream Songs has become an enduring landmark in American poetry and a tribute to Berryman's own endurance in the face of alcoholism, depression and mental instability. In 1972 he leaped to his death from a bridge above the Mississippi River.

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The Emperor's Tomb is a magically evocative, haunting elegy to the vanished world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and to the passing of time and the loss of youth and friends. Prophetic and regretful, intuitive and exact, Roth's acclaimed novel is the tale of one man's struggle to come to terms with the uncongenial society of post-First World War Vienna and the first intimations of Nazi barbarities.

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In his first novel, Werner Herzog tells a hypnotic tale inspired by the true story of a Japanese soldier who defended a small island for twenty-nine years after the end of WWII1944: Lubang Island, the Philippines. With Japanese troops about to withdraw, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was given orders by his superior officer: Hold the island until the Imperial army's return. You are to defend its territory by guerrilla tactics, at all costs.So began Onoda's long campaign. Soon weeks turned into months, months into years, and years into decades - until eventually time itself seemed to melt away. All the while Onoda continued to fight his fictitious war, at once surreal and tragic, at first with other soldiers, and then, finally, alone, a character in a novel of his own making. . .'An enthralling novel that explores the nature of time and warfare with great mastery' Mail on Sunday'Herzog. . .brilliantly blends fact and fiction in this fever dream of a novel' Daily Mail'A literary jewel set to sparkle against the backdrop of his monumental career in cinema' i

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A Poetry Book Society recommendationArranged in three parts - the first concerning other people's lives, the second autobiographical, the third to do with the poet's travels in Mexico - Corona, Corona displays to the full Michael Hofmann's gift for compressed and vividly pointed reportage. It offers some of the boldest, frankest and most searching poetry of our time.

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Michael Kohlhaas has been wronged. First his finest horses were unfairly confiscated and mistreated. And things keep going worse—his servants have been beaten, his wife killed, and the lawsuits he pursues are stymied—but Kohlhaas, determined to find justice at all costs, tirelessly persists. Standing up against the bureaucratic machine of the empire, Kohlhaas becomes an indomitable figure that you can’t help rooting for from start to finish. Knotty, darkly comical, magnificent in its weirdness, and one of the greatest and most influential tales in German literature, this short novel, first published in German in 1810, is now available in award-winning Michael Hofmann’s sparkling new English translation.

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Cow is the story of a Spanish agricultural labourer, Ambrosio, who goes to Switzerland as a Gastarbeiter. He is bound for Innenwald, a village in the Swiss highlands, and the novel begins as he is about to spend a summer working for Farmer Knuchel. It ends in the abattoir of the neighbouring city, at the end of the seven hard years of labour that have destroyed him. There he sees Blosch, the once magnificent lead cow on Knuchel's farm, now a sad, condemned creature in the abattoir. Cow was acclaimed as a contemporary classic on first publication. Now more than ever it must be read as a book of archaic power about man, his work and his food and, most importantly, as a damning indictment of the relationship between man and the animal world.

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Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, Einstein – all praised the writings of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), a mathematician, physicist and astronomer by profession, and an aphorist and satirist on the sly. In Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl, novelist Gert Hofmann weaves a wondrous fictionalized tale of Lichtenberg’s real-life romance with “the model of beauty and sweetness,” Maria Stechard, a flower seller he meets one day near his laboratory in Gottingen. “The greater part of what I commit to paper is untrue, and the best of it is nonsense!” says Lichtenberg, our hunchbacked hero. His daily life of “wrestling with death,” of electricity machines and exploding gases, is plunged into new passion the day he encounters the Stechardess: “Something is found that was lost for a long time.” Soon he teaches her to read and write, she helps him keep house… and then? Colored with Lichtenberg’s boisterous, enlightening meditations on life, death and everything in-between, this stunning fable-of-awakening was described by The Washington Post as “a quiet and convincing description of human happiness… a fine and original book.”

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Blood Brothers is the only known novel by German social worker and journalist Ernst Haffner, of whom nearly all traces were lost during the course of the Second World War. Told in stark, unsparing detail, Haffner's story delves into the illicit underworld of Berlin on the eve of Hitler's rise to power, describing how these blood brothers move from one petty crime to the next, spending their nights in underground bars and makeshift hostels, struggling together to survive the harsh realities of gang life, and finding in one another the legitimacy denied them by society.

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'He is in a category of one. You can't believe that a person like this stalks the earth. A complete original and an amazing person' MARINA HYDE'A visionary masterpiece' JOHN GRAY, NEW STATESMANThe long-awaited memoir by the legendary filmmaker and celebrated author. Told in Werner Herzog's inimitable voice, this is the story of his epic artistic career, as inventive and daring as anything he has done before.Hauling a steamship over a mountain in the jungle; walking from Munich to Paris in the dead of winter; descending into an active volcano; living in the wilderness among grizzly bears - Werner Herzog has always been intrigued by extremes of human experience. Here, he illuminates the influences and ideas that have driven his creativity and shaped his unique worldview.Herzog's life matches the drama of his famous films: the boy growing up in poverty in a small village in the Alps after the Second World War; the teenager travelling the world in search of adventure that almost cost him his life; the director trying to calm his leading actor Klaus Kinski in the Amazonian jungle. And along the way, Herzog tells of ordinary people with extraordinary stories: rural labourers, circus acrobats, child soldiers.Every Man for Himself and God Against All is at once a personal record of one of the great self-invented lives of our time, and a masterpiece that will enthral fans old and new. In a hypnotic swirl of memory, Herzog untangles and relives his most important experiences and inspirations, telling his story for the first and only time.*A New Statesman Book of the Year 2023*---Praise for Werner Herzog's previous books:'Has the eerie power of the best fairytales. It hits you with the force of dreams' HELEN MACDONALD'Surely the strangest, strongest walking book I know ... only Herzog could have written this weird, slender classic' ROBERT MACFARLANE'Herzog's writing bristles with the same eerie and uncompromising energy as his films' GUARDIAN

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This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he himself thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, and The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka's eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.

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'If I think about it, and I have the time and inclination and capacity to do so, we dogs are an odd lot.'How does a dog see the world? How do any of us? In this playful and enigmatic story of a canine philosopher, Kafka explores the limits of knowledge. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

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Blood Brothers is the only known novel by German social worker and journalist Ernst Haffner, of whom nearly all traces were lost during the course of the Second World War. Told in stark, unsparing detail, Haffner's story delves into the illicit underworld of Berlin on the eve of Hitler's rise to power, describing how these blood brothers move from one petty crime to the next, spending their nights in underground bars and makeshift hostels, struggling together to survive the harsh realities of gang life, and finding in one another the legitimacy denied them by society.

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'A hugely significant and wonderfully haunting collection' William Boyd In the 1920s and 1930s, Joseph Roth travelled extensively in Europe, living in hotels and writing about the towns through which he passed and the people he encountered. Collected in one volume, his experiences in Italy, Germany, Russia, Albania and Ukraine form a series of tender vignettes that capture life in the inter-war years. Evocative, curious and sharply observed, these literary postcards document a continent clinging to tradition while on the brink of further upheaval.

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Rebellion is the story of Great War veteran Andreas Pum, who loses a leg and gains a medal. He marries, plays a barrel organ and is happy. But hen he is imprisoned after a fight, life seems unbearably altered. A chance encounter with an old comrade who has made his fortune introduces Pum to a world where he has a transfiguring experience of justice.

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A man and a woman meet in a park. The man has a story to share, one of a past relationship that contains echoes, similarities to the woman's life too remarkable to be considered just a coincidence. And so the lines of reality begin to blur. Is the man a warning from the future? Is the woman destined to repeat the same mistakes? Who really exists? Is there such thing as fate?

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Gillian seems to have it all - she is beautiful, successful, and securely married. But one night, after an argument with her husband, their car crashes on a wet road, and everything is lost. When she wakes in the hospital, she is a widow with a ruined face and no way back to the person she thought she was. It is only when she begins to piece together the painful shards of her present existence and revisit a relationship from her past that she is able to glimpse the freedom that might come with her loss. From the master of unadorned storytelling, All Days Are Night is a quietly disquieting exploration of identity, inside and out.

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'One of the greatest novels ever written' Philippe Sands Roth's masterpiece: an epic, moving account of the final days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, told through the fortunes of one family. Set against the doomed splendour of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, The Radetzky March tells the story of the celebrated Trotta family, tracing their rise and fall over three generations. Theirs is a sweeping history of heroism and duty, desire and compromise, tragedy and heartbreak, a story that lasts until the darkening eve of World War One, when all is set to fall apart. Rich, epic and profoundly moving, The Radetzky March is Joseph Roth's timeless masterpiece. 'For sheer, epic sweep, I love reading The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, set in imperial Vienna. I can't recommend it highly enough' Jeremy Paxman 'Timeless... I re-read this book every two or three years, captivated anew by its low-key melancholia and its wry take on the human predicament' William Boyd, Mail on Sunday 'He saw, he listened, he understood. The Radetzky March is a dark, disturbing novel of eccentric beauty... If you have yet to experience Roth, begin here, and then read everything' Irish Times

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From the bestselling author of Alone in Berlin, his acclaimed novel of a young couple trying to survive life in 1930s Germany'Nothing so confronts a woman with the deathly futility of her existence as darning socks'A young couple fall in love, get married and start a family, like countless young couples before them. But Lämmchen and 'Boy' live in Berlin in 1932, and everything is changing. As they desperately try to make ends meet amid bullying bosses, unpaid bills, monstrous mothers-in-law and Nazi streetfighters, will love be enough?The novel that made Hans Fallada's name as a writer, Little Man, What Now? tells the story of one of European literature's most touching couples and is filled with an extraordinary mixture of comedy and desperation. It was published just before Hitler came to power and remains a haunting portrayal of innocents whose world is about to be swept away forever. This brilliant new translation by Michael Hofmann brings to life an entire era of austerity and turmoil in Weimar Germany.'An inspired work of a great writer ... Fallada is a genius. The "Little Man" is Mr Everybody' Beryl Bainbridge'There are chapters which pluck the nerves...there are chapters which raise the spirits like a fine day in the country. The truth and variety of the characterization is superb...it recognizes that the world is not to be altered with moral fables' Graham Greene'Fallada deserves high praise for having reported so realistically, so truthfully, with such closeness to life' Herman Hesse'Fallada at his best' Philip Hensher'Performs the most astounding task, of taking us to a moment before history' Los Angeles Review of Books

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THE ACCLAIMED INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER'One of the most extraordinary and compelling novels written about World War II. Ever' Alan Furst Inspired by a true story, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin is a gripping wartime thriller following one ordinary man's determination to defy the tyranny of Nazi rule Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat and mouse develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich. When petty criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, deception, betrayal and murder ensue, tightening the noose around the Quangels' necks ...This Penguin Classics edition contains an afterword by Geoff Wilkes, as well as facsimiles of the original Gestapo file which inspired the novel.'Terrific ... a fast-moving, important and astutely deadpan thriller' Irish Times'An unrivalled and vivid portrait of life in wartime Berlin' Philip Kerr'To read Fallada's testament to the darkest years of the 20th century is to be accompanied by a wise, somber ghost who grips your shoulder and whispers into your ear: "This is how it was. This is what happened"' The New York Times

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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 Chamberlain involved. Little Kully is far more interested where their next meal will come from and the ladies who seem to buzz around her father. Meanwhile she and her parents roam through Europe. Her mother would just like to settle down, but as her restless father struggles to find a new publisher, the three must escape from country to country as their visas expire, money runs out and hotel bills mount up.

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The final, previously unpublished novel by the author of All Quiet on the Western Front - a dreamlike, powerfully moving account of an emigrant's experience of New York during World War II. From the detention centre on Ellis Island, Ludwig Somner looks across a small stretch of water to the glittering towers of New York, which whisper seductively of freedom after so many years of wandering through a perlious, suffering Europe. Remarque's final novel, left unfinished at his death, tells of the precarious life of the refugee – life lived in hotel lobbies, on false passports, the strange, ill-assorted refugee community held together by an unspeakable past. For Somner, each new luxury - ice cream served in drugstores, bright shop windows, art, a new suit, a new romance - has a bittersweet edge. Memories of war and inhumanity continue to resurface even in this peaceful promised land.

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