Robert Musil’s monumental novel The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) is one of the defining works of twentieth-century modernist literature. Set in Vienna on the eve of World War I, the narrative unfolds in the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, capturing the intellectual, political, and cultural tensions of a world on the brink of collapse. At its center is Ulrich, a highly intelligent yet detached man, often described as a "man without qualities," who struggle...

The Confusions of Young Torless is a taut, powerful depiction of teenage masculinity in this short novel set in an Austrian military academy. An unpopular boy is gradually bullied and humiliated by a coterie of better-off classmates until the almost unbearable conclusion. This was the work which made Musil's name and is his most popular work before his unfinished masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities.

The stories here collected under the title Five Women combine two different volumes. All together, these stories, each of which (as the reader will guess) has a woman at the apparent centre of its gaze, has the feel of a series study, or of a natural history, though one performed in a strange and not entirely rational laboratory, or field. The intensity in these stories derives in part from looking at humans under the very ordinary extremities of love and desire. Neither love, nor feminini...