The second in a series: the master filmmaker’s prose scenarios for four of his notable filmsOn the first day of editing Fata Morgana, Werner Herzog recalls, his editor said: “With this kind of material we have to pretend to invent cinema.” And this, Herzog says, is what he tries to do every day. In this second volume of his scenarios, the peerless filmmaker’s genius for invention is on clear display. Written in Herzog’s signature fashion—more prose poem th...

The definitive English version of two landmark works of world literatureGoethe was a master of the short prose form. His two narrative cycles, Conversations of German Refugees and Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, both written during a high point of his career, address various social issues and reveal his experimentation with narrative and perspective. A traditional cycle of novellas, Conversations of German Refugees deals with the impa...

Newly repackaged as a Penguin paperback, Conquest of the Useless, the legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog's diary of the making of Fitzcarraldo, one of his most revered and classic filmsIn 1982, the visionary directory Werner Herzog released Fitzcarraldo, a lavish film about a would-be rubber baron who pulls a 320-ton steamship over a mountain. It was hailed instantly by critics around the globe as a masterpiece and won Herzog the 1982 Outs...

For the first time in English, and in his signature prose poetry, the film scripts of four of Werner Herzog’s early works“Herzog doesn’t write traditional scripts,” Film International remarked of the master filmmaker’s Scenarios I and II. “Instead, he writes scenarios which are like a hybrid of film, fiction, and prose poetry.”Continuing a series that Publishers Weekly pronounced “compulsively readable . . . equal parts c...

“[Handke is] a supremely talented writer . . . The Ballad of the Last Guest conjures the spirit of [Kafka and Camus].” —Tobias Grey, Financial Times"Magnificently moving . . . [Handke] connects us, almost against our will, to the eternal." —Bailey Trela, The Threepenny ReviewA novel about a man who returns home, only to find that home is now unrecognizable, by the Nobel laureate Peter Handke....

“Once upon a time there was a father who, because he had grown old, called together his sons and daughters—four, five, six, eight in number—and finally convinced them, after long hesitation, to do as he wished. Now they are sitting around a table and begin to talk…”In a great literary experiment, Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they record memories of their childhoods, of growing up, and of their father, who was always at work on a new ...

When Hans Jonas died in 1993, he was revered among American scholars specializing in European philosophy, but his thought had not yet made great inroads among a wider public. In Germany, conversely, during the 1980s, when Jonas himself was an octogenarian, he became a veritable intellectual celebrity, owing to the runaway success of his 1979 book The Imperative of Responsibility. In the 1920s, Jonas studied philosophy with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, but the Nazi regime f...

Six essays on creativity from one of the twentieth century’s foremost Jungian psychologistsErich Neumann, whom C. G. Jung regarded as one of his most gifted students, devoted much of his later writing to the theme of creativity. This landmark book brings together six of Neumann's groundbreaking essays on the subject. He finds his examples not only in the work of writers and artists—William Blake, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Paul Kle...