What is it to feel nostalgia, to be skeptical of it yet cleave intently to the complex truths of feeling and thought? In a series of 64 gorgeous, ramifying, unsettling prose poems addressing late-twentieth- and twenty-first century experience and its discontents, The Ruins of Nostalgia offers a strikingly original exploration of the misunderstood phenomenon of nostalgia as both feeling-state and historical phenomenon. Each poem, also titled The Ruins of Nostalgia, is a kind of ly...

"In this fascinating book, Donna Stonecipher doubles down on the development of prose poetry and the city. Tactically, her sweeping, complex yet meticulous essay engages Baudelaire's sudden--or is it sudden?--incursion from the constraints of verse into the 'roominess' of prose, 'paragraphs of place, ' while linking 'civic horizontality' and 'corporate verticality.' Tracking possibilities, (m)using everything from architecture to landscape to cookbooks, fl neur-like, her essay exuberantly ...

**A riveting and deftly rendered meditation on the removal of ornament from the built environment in Berlin.An illustrated urban history guaranteed to make you see your city anew, from an award-winning contemporary poet.**When the poet Donna Stonecipher first moved to Berlin in 2004, she noticed something strange: street after street was lined with blank façades. Where once ornament had gamboled across those surfaces, now rows of scraped-clean apartment buildings greeted th...

A collection of poetic stream-of-consciousness prose meditations by Friederike Mayröcker.Friederike Mayröcker has no time. Not for summary and memory, not for excessive reviewing and reasoning, and certainly not for storytelling. She doesn’t even have time for life itself—unless it’s writing. What counts, in her view, is only the poetry and “the echoic inventions” of a life that lasted for almost a century, which is preserved in her writings.Widely consider...

Revolving around the opera, these tales are an “archaeological excavation of the slag-heaps of our collective existence” (W. G. Sebald)Combining fact and fiction, each of the one hundred and two tales of Alexander Kluge’s Temple of the Scapegoat (dotted with photos of famous operas and their stars) compresses a lifetime of feeling and thought: Kluge is deeply engaged with the opera and an inventive wellspring of narrative notions. The titles of his stories...

Reveling in the paradox of the formal prose poem, Donna Stonecipher’s Transaction Histories gathers together six series of poems that explore the disobedient incongruities of aesthetics and emotions. Stonecipher’s carefully sculpted forms and exacting language are held in tension with an unruly imagination to provoke a vision of experience densely layered with bodies impinging upon and altering each other, engaging in transactions that unfold in poetically complex and emotionally ...

Preußische Residenz, deutsche Hauptstadt, glanzvolle Kulturmetropole, Machtzentrale des "Dritten Reiches", Frontstadt im Kalten Krieg und schließlich wieder Hauptstadt eines vereinigten Deutschland: Bernd Stöver erzählt knapp und anschaulich, was jeder über die Geschichte Berlins wissen sollte.Während andere europäische Metropolen mit historischen Stadtkernen aufwarten, wurden in Berlin Zeugnisse früherer Epochen immer wieder zerstört. Wo sich die mittelalterlichen Kaufmannssiedlung...

Now available in a single, abridged paperback, Ian Kershaw's Hitler is the definitive biography of the Nazi leader.Ian Kershaw's two volume biography, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris and Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis, was greeted with universal acclaim as the essential work on one of the most malign figures in history, from his earliest origins to the final days of the Second World War.Now this landmark historical work is available in one si...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLYFor more than four hundred years, the art of ballet has stood at the center of Western civilization. Its traditions serve as a record of our past. Lavishly illustrated and beautifully told, Apollo’s Angels—the first cultural history of bal...

**An absorbing, revelatory, and definitive account of one of the greatest tragedies in human history, by the author of The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and Hitler's People“This is history in the grand style, the kind of large-scale narrative that few historians dare to write these days. It is difficult to imagine how it could be improved upon, let alone surpassed.” —The Washington Post"This superb book is n...

**The definitive account of Hitler's rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany, from the author of The Third Reich in Power, The Third Reich at War, and Hitler's People"The clearest and most gripping account I've read of German life before and during the rise of the Nazis." —A. S Byatt, Times Literary Supplement"Impressive in its command of an immense literature, perceptive in analysis, fluent in style, and humane in ...

**The acclaimed and comprehensive account of Germany's transformation under Hitler's total rule and the inexorable march to war, by the author of The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich at War, and Hitler's People“[A] masterpiece. Fluidly narrated, tightly organized and comprehensive.” —The New York Times“A major achievement.” —The Boston Globe**By the middle of 1933, the democracy of the Weimar Republic had been transforme...