Beatrix uses words like she uses paint. . .with brush strokes so vivid and rich I feel as if I’m there watching as her story unfolds. I love this book!” Sissy SpacekBeatrix Ost’s memoir of her artistic awakening and early marriage opens on the heels of Germany’s recovery from the self-imposed disasters of World War II. She is part of the new generation that dances disobediently in the bombed-out villas and underground jazz caverns of Munich. Beatrix rides the dynamic decade up th...

Introduction by Andrew SolomonAs a young girl growing up in the ’40s on a vast estate near Munich, Trixi Ost lives a life that is charmed by talent and privilege yet scarred by turbulent times. She enjoys the attentions of a beloved grandfather who sings her songs and holds forth in Latin, the pig and the deer she keeps as pets, and a wide freedom to roam. But everyday routine is swiftly upended as the estate becomes temporary home to an unlikely collection of people displaced by t...

One of the greatest modern novels, The Tin Drum is the story of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is being held in a mental institution. Matzerath provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition in the modern world.In this edition, Breon Mitchell, acclaimed translator and scholar, draws from a wealth of detailed scholarship to produce a tr...

A fable about the power of books and knowledge, "finely balanced between pathos and comedy," from one of Czechoslovakia's most popular authors ( Los Angeles Times).A New York Times Notable BookHaňtá has been compacting trash for thirty-five years. Every evening, he rescues books from the jaws of his hydraulic press, carries them home, and fills his house with them. Haňtá may be an idiot, as his boss calls him, but he is an idiot with a difference—t...

"THE HOTTEST NEW BOOK FROM ICELAND IS WOMAN AT 1,000 DEGREES . . . What a story it is, one worth reading to further understand the complexity of World War II—and to enjoy the quick wit of a woman you won't forget." —Bethanne Patrick, The Washington Post"I live here alone in a garage, together with a laptop computer and an old hand grenade. It's pretty cozy."Herra Björnsson is at the beginning of the end of her life. Oh, she has two weeks lef...

A powerful and moving novel about the ravages war and the need to tell the truth, even in the face of adversity.After the close of a great war, a mysterious stranger arrives in a small European village. He is an artist and he begins sketching the villagers, showing the painful reality of the crimes and betrayals the war left in its wake. Consumed by distrust, the villagers conspire and murder him. The authorities commission Brodeck, a timid, low-level bureaucrat, to write a report ...

“Dancing On One Foot” confronts a major issue—World War II observed during the author’s childhood in Nazi Germany. It explores the psychological imprint of that experience and the healing in later years after the author settles in the High Desert of the American Southwest. The book is also a tribute to the ability of women and children to survive hardships and celebrate life in all its straight and crooked ways—to dance, even if there’s only one foot left to stand on. Here is the account o...

THE FIRST NOVEL IN PHILIP KERR’S ACCLAIMED HISTORICAL MYSTERY SERIESWhen private investigator Bernie Gunther agrees to track down some stolen jewels, his search takes him down the dangerous streets of pre-World War 2 Berlin and into the path of the most influential players in Nazi Germany…Wisecracking cop turned private investigator Bernie Gunther specializes in missing persons, and as the Third Reich’s power has grown, Bernie has become a ...

**A New York Times Bestseller • A Washington Post Best Book of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book“[Pynchon's] funniest and arguably his most accessible novel.” —The New York Times Book Review**“Audacious, bodacious, entropic, synoptic, electric, eclectic, entertaining, hyperbraining, high-roller, tripolar . . . Buy Against the Day." —The Philadelphia InquirerSpanning the era between the Chi...

A wealthy family tries—and fails—to seal themselves off from the aftermath of World War II in this historical fiction “masterpiece” by one of Germany’s most important post-war writers (The New Yorker).In East Prussia, January 1945, the German forces are in retreat and the Red Army is approaching. The von Globig family’s manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into disrepair. Auntie runs the estate as best she can since Eberhard von Globig, a special office...

Rake, drunkard, aesthete, gossip, raconteur extraordinaire: the narrator of Bohumil Hrabal’s rambling, rambunctious masterpiece Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is all these and more. Speaking to a group of sunbathing women who remind him of lovers past, this elderly roué tells the story of his life—or at least unburdens himself of a lifetime’s worth of stories. Thus we learn of amatory conquests (and humiliations), of scandals both private and public, of military adventure...

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011In 1989, the year the Wall came down, a university student in Berlin on his morning run finds a corpse on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This scene opens a novel of extraordinary scope and depth, a masterwork that traces the fate of myriad Europeans—Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies—across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century.Three unusual men are at the heart of Parallel Stories