The Innocents is Hermann Broch's searching "novel in eleven narratives," a mosaic of stories, dialogues, and lyric interludes that traces German life from the Wilhelmine years to the threshold of Nazism. Its central concern is not spectacular villainy but the quieter guilt of passivity: the bourgeois refusal to judge, act, or assume historical responsibility. Written in Broch's high modernist manner, the book blends psychological realism, philosophical meditation, and symbolic patterning, ...

Hermann Broch, born on November 1, 1886, in Vienna, Austria, and died on May 30, 1951, in New Haven, Connecticut, was an Austrian writer, one of the greatest modernist writers of all time. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Hermann Broch is a novelist of the stature of Joyce and Proust. The Death of Virgil is considered by many as his masterpiece. The novel recreates the last day of the poet Virgil's life, hours during which he considers destroyi...

With his epic trilogy, The Sleepwalkers, Hermann Broch established himself as one of the great innovators of modern literature, a visionary writer-philosopher the equal of James Joyce, Thomas Mann, or Robert Musil. Even as he grounded his narratives in the intimate daily life of Germany, Broch was identifying the oceanic changes that would shortly sweep that life into the abyss.Whether he is writing about a neurotic army officer (The Romantic), a disgruntled bookke...

By any measure, Hermann Broch was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Author of The Sleepwalkers and The Spell, he stands, together with James Joyce and Marcel Proust, at the pinnacle of literary Modernism. Born in 1886, he saw the First World War destroy the culture and consciousness of what had come before, seeing the West thrust unwillingly into the modern age. By 1938 Broch found himself arrested and detained, during which time be began work on his g...

It is the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar's enchanter, has been summoned to the palace, where he will shortly die. Out of the last hours of Virgil's life and the final stirrings of his consciousness, the Austrian writer Hermann Broch fashioned one of the great works of twentieth-century modernism, a book that embraces an entire world and renders it with an immediacy that is at once sensual and profound. Begun while Broch was impr...

Ranging from one-page fantasies to novella-length studies of everyday existence, The Walk reveals the irresistible genius of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Under-appreciated even in his own lifetime, Robert Walser has nonetheless been recognised by such writers as W.G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, Franz Kafka, Herman Hesse and J.M. Coetzee.Like Kafka and Sebald, Walser wrote about the solitude and unease of human existence. Honest, wry and idiosyncratic, his sto...

A New York Review Books OriginalIn 1905 the young Swiss writer Robert Walser arrived in Berlin to join his older brother Karl, already an important stage-set designer, and immediately threw himself into the vibrant social and cultural life of the city. Berlin Stories collects his alternately celebratory, droll, and satirical observations on every aspect of the bustling German capital, from its theaters, cabarets, painters’ galleries, and literary salons, to the metropolita...

"It's just a masterpiece. When I read it I thought, how is it that we don't know about this-how is it that I am the only person I know who's read this book?" Wes Anderson, on Stefan Zweig's Beware of PityContents: *A Conversation with Wes Anderson-*Wes Anderson discusses Zweig's life and work with Zweig biographer George Prochnik. *The World of Yesterday-*Selected extracts from Zweig's memoir, an unrivalled evocation of bygone Europe. *Beware of Pity-*An e...

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father’s house in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a piece of brightly-coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a board which she held on her knee. They were mostly silent, talking as their thoughts strayed through their minds.“Ursula,” said Gudrun, “don’t you really want to get married?” Ursula laid her embroidery in her lap and looked up. Her face was calm and considerate.

264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox: potter Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in the Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie. Later, when Edmund inherited the 'netsuke', they unlocked a story far larger than he could ever have imagined...The Ephrussis came from Odessa, and at one time were the largest grain exporters in the world; in the 1870s, Charles Ephrussi was part of a wealthy new generation settling in Paris. ...

The Complete works of Franz Kafka with active table of content for easy navigation through all of his great works.

‘What a marvellous book this is . . . de Botton dissects what [Proust] had to say about friendship, reading, looking carefully, paying attention taking your time, being alive and adds his own delicious commentary. The result is an intoxicating as it is wise, amusing as well as stimulating, and presented in so fresh a fashion as to be unique . . . I could not stop, and now much start all over again.’ Brian Masters, Mail on Sunday‘De Botton not only has a complete understan...