In an industry that celebrates extravagance and showmanship, Danish film director Carl Th. Dreyer was a rarity, a man who guarded his privacy fiercely and believed that film provided a way to understand human nature by focusing on the individual person. Best known for his 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc, dominated by its emotionally harrowing close-ups of Joan during her trial, it was Dreyer who pioneered some of the seminal techniques of modern film, techniques that would la...

Persecuted as a Jew, both under the Nazis and in postwar East Germany, Johanna Krause (1907–2001) courageously fought her way through life with searing humour and indomitable strength of character. Johanna Krause Twice Persecuted is her story.Born in Dresden into bitter poverty, Krause received little education and worked mostly in shops and factories. In 1933, when she came to the defence of a Jewish man being beaten by the brownshirts, Krause was jailed for “insulting th...

"Full of Weimar Berlin decadence and the scandal of Hollywood, this is a gloriously entertaining read. Marlene is utterly beguiling." —Beatriz Williams, New York Times–bestselling authorRaised in genteel poverty after the First World War, Maria Magdalena Dietrich dreams of a life on the stage. When a budding career as a violinist is cut short, the willful teenager vows to become a singer, trading her family's proper, middle-class society for the free-spirit...

'In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself'Intimate, vulnerable and unsparing, Reborn bears witness to the evolution of Susan Sontag.With entries dating from 1947-1963, the first instalment from Susan Sontag's diaries charts her ascension from early adolescence to her early thirties. Unabashed, though thoroughly self-reflective, Sontag's diaries reveal the inner ...

Book 3 in the Songs in the Night trilogyFollowing World War II, little has changed in Berlin. The Swastika has been replaced by the Hammer and Sickle, and the soldiers by secret police, but a life of daily oppression and fear remains. Inspired by the teachings of Joseph Schumacher, an unlikely coalition forms to sneak six disabled young people over the Berlin Wall, out of Communist East Germany. Once begun, two possible fates await them: freedom or death.

Book 1 of the Songs in the Night trilogy. Enter the world of Nazi Germany. The story begins with a soul-searching pastor who sees the youth of his church abandoning everything they've been taught, swayed by Hitler's youth movement. Some pastors have preached against Hitler, only to be arrested and shipped to labor camps. It's one thing to speak up if it means his own personal suffering, but to take a stand against the Nazis now will endanger not only him, but his wife and unborn child....

A little known, rediscovered letter: an SOS from a woman trapped on a Swiss mountaintop in a TB colony with no idea how to escape—that woman being Dorothy Parker.“Kids, I have started one thousand (1,000) letters to you, but they all through no will of mine got to sounding so gloomy and I was afraid of boring the combined tripe out of you, so I never sent them.” Thus starts a little-known and until now unpublished letter by Dorothy Parker from a Swiss mountaintop. ...

Nordic Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, Film and TV by Britain's leading expert on crime fiction, Barry Forshaw, is a compact and authoritative guide to the phenomenally popular genre. The information-packed study examines and celebrates books, films and TV adaptations, from Sjöwall & Wahlöö's highly influential Martin Beck series through Henning Mankell's Wallander (subject of three separate TV series) to Stieg Larsson's groundbreaking ...

Travesties was born out of Stoppard's noting that in 1917 three of the twentieth century's most crucial revolutionaries -- James Joyce, the Dadaist founder Tristan Tzara, and Lenin -- were all living in Zurich. Also living in Zurich at this time was a British consula official called Henry Carr, a man acquainted with Joyce through the theater and later through a lawsuit concerning a pair of trousers. Taking Carr as his core, Stoppard spins this historical coincidence into a masterf...

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography)Named of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and the Boston GlobeMagisterial in scope, this dual biography examines two complex lives that began alike but ended on opposite sides of the century’s greatest conflict.Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, born less than a year apart, lived so close to each other that Riefenstahl could see into...

Irene Levin Berman was born, raised, and educated in Norway. Her first conscious recollection of life goes back to 1942, when as a young child she escaped to Sweden, a neutral country during World War II, to avoid annihilation. Germany had invaded Norway and the persecution of two thousand Norwegian Jews had begun. Seven members of her father's family were among the seven hundred and seventy-one unfortunate persons who were deported and sent to Auschwitz.In 2005, Irene was forced t...

Often typecast as a menacing figure, Peter Lorre achieved Hollywood fame first as a featured player and later as a character actor, trademarking his screen performances with a delicately strung balance between good and evil. His portrayal of the child murderer in Fritz Lang's masterpiece M (1931) catapulted him to international fame. Lang said of Lorre: "He gave one of the best performances in film history and certainly the best in his life." Today, the Hungarian-born actor is also recogni...