An entrancing avant-garde adventure at the dawn of the modern ageIn 1909, municipal authorities built an airfield in northern Italy and invited leading pilots to compete on it. The show attracted thousands of spectators--among them Giacomo Puccini and Gabriele d'Annunzio--and reporters, including, amazingly, Franz Kafka, Max Brod, and Luigi Barzini. Peter Demetz's sparkling new book tells the enchanting story of what happened in the air and on the ground before, dur...

Only recently available for the first time in English, Panorama is the newly rediscovered first novel of H. G. Adler, a modernist master whose work has been compared to that of Kafka, Joyce, and Solzhenitsyn. A brilliant epic told in ten distinct vignettes, Panorama is a portrait of a place and people soon to be destroyed, as seen through the eyes of the young Josef Kramer. It moves from the pastoral World War I–era Bohemia of Josef’s youth, to a German boarding school fu...

Now acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age, Johannes Vermeer specialised in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life in his home city of Delft. The artist’s reputation fell into obscurity after his death and it was not until the 19th century that his work was rediscovered by Gustav Friedrich Waagen and Théophile Thoré-Bürger, who published an essay attributing 66 pictures to him. Since that time, Vermeer’s reputation has continued to grow, recogni...

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

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle AwardThe real story behind the major motion picture The Monuments Men. The cast of characters includes Hitler and Goering, Gertrude Stein and Marc Chagall--not to mention works by artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Pablo Picasso. And the story told in this superbly researched and suspenseful book is that of the Third Reich's war on European culture and the Allies' desperate effort to preserve it.From the Na...

A stunning elegy to a vanished time, Caroline Heller's memoir traces the lives of her parents, her uncle and their circle of intellectuals and dreamers from Central Europe on the eve of World War Two to present-day America.In this unforgettable dual memoir of her parents' lives and her own, Caroline Heller brings to life the lost world of European café culture, and reminds us of the sustaining power of literature in the most challenging of times.Heller vivi...

A German woman recounts her youth during World War II under Hitler's regime in this "richly texture memoir" ( Publishers Weekly).Growing up in the beautiful mountains of Berchtesgaden—just steps from Adolf Hitler's alpine retreat—Irmgard Hunt had a seemingly happy, simple childhood. In her powerful, illuminating, and sometimes frightening memoir, Hunt recounts a youth lived under an evil but persuasive leader. As she grew older, the harsh reality of war—and...

Foreword by Robert Macfarlane: 'A magnificent feat'Jan Morris - then James - first visited Trieste as a young soldier at the end of the Second World War. She was beguiled by its hallucinatory magic; its wistful melancholy; its enigmatic changeability.Half a century later, this unique city on the Adriatic became a symbol of her own life, with all its hopes, loves and disappointments. Whether meandering along the waterfront or experiencing the street life, he...

The Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt was a founding member of the Vienna Secession, whose celebrated paintings and murals are widely regarded as modern masterpieces of twentieth century art. The Masters of Art Series presents the world’s first digital e-Art books, allowing digital readers to explore the works of the world’s greatest artists in comprehensive detail. This volume presents Klimt’s complete paintings in beautiful detail, with concise introductions and hundreds of...

Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece is on any art historian's list of the ten most important paintings ever made. Often referred to by the subject of its central panel, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, it represents the fulcrum between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is also the most frequently stolen artwork of all time.Since its completion in 1432, this twelve-panel oil painting has been looted in three different wars, burned, dismembered, forged, smuggled, illegall...

Ten Green Bottles is the story of Nini Karpel's struggles as she told it to her daughter Vivian Jeanette Kaplan so many years ago. This true story depicts the fierce perseverance of one family, victims of the forces of evil, who overcame suffering of biblical proportion to survive. It was a time when ordinary people became heroes.To Nini Karpel, growing up in Vienna during the 1920s was a romantic confection. Whether schussing down ski slopes or speaking o...

The final work of fiction from Norman Mailer, a defining voice of the postwar era, is also one of his most ambitious, taking as its subject the evil of Adolf Hitler. The narrator, a mysterious SS man in possession of extraordinary secrets, follows Adolf from birth through adolescence and offers revealing portraits of Hitler’s parents and siblings. A crucial reflection on the shadows that eclipsed the twentieth century, Mailer’s noveldelivers myriad twists and surprises along with character...