In 1935 Paris, the French Communist Party faces a surreal dilemma: Moscow demands a black African delegate for its upcoming Festival of Peace, but none can be found—until a flamboyant vaudeville performer named Luciano di Lammermoor unexpectedly fits the part.With wit and quiet precision, Michael Kleeberg turns a historical farce into a pointed meditation on identity, ideology

Gustav Rubin, a fur dealer in Vienna, flies to New York to spend the summer with his wife and two young children in a lake house north of the city. When he arrives late at JFK, he is met by his opinionated, unrelenting mother, Rosa. They rent a car and set out for Lake Gilead. But Gustav loses his way, and son and mother end up on the wrong side of the river. Trying to find the right route north, they become trapped on the Tappan Zee Bridge in the traffic jam of all traffic jams–a truck tr...

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice SelectionNamed one of the Best Books of the Year by the Economist and Kirkus ReviewsThis “splendid biography” (Wall Street Journal) of Goethe presents his life and work as an essential touchstone for the modern age.A masterful intellectual portrait, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is celebrated as the seminal twenty-first-century biography of the ...

An award-winning journalist transforms his lifelong fascination with the world of the Gypsies into fiction with this exuberant, deeply enchanting debut novel—both whimsical and suspenseful—winner of the European Book Prize, and translated into more than a dozen languages worldwide.November 1957: As Communism spreads across Eastern Europe, strange events are beginning to upend daily life in Baia Luna, a tiny village nestled at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. As the Soviets rac...

Appearing together in English for the first time, two masterpieces that take on the jazz age, the Nuremburg trials, postwar commercialism, and the feat of writing a book, presented in one brilliant volumeThe Death of My Brother Abel and its delirious sequel, Cain, constitute the magnum opus of Gregor von Rezzori’s prodigious career, the most ambitious, extravagant, outrageous, and deeply considered achievement of this wildly original and never les...

"I'm stunned by the silence," says Martin Roth - which is why he chose to conduct these conversations with his three adult children. The great European Martin Roth is convinced that animated discourse between people of different generations is one way of effectively thwarting the crisis of societal values; a way to rebuild trust in the awareness of one's own history and to pass this on to future generations. The result is an inspiring plea for an open, tolerant coexistence in a Europe in w...

In 1934, Veza Taubner and Elias Canetti were married in Vienna. Elias describes the arrangement to his brother Georges as a “functional” marriage. Meanwhile, an intense intellectual love affair develops between Veza and Georges, a young doctor suffering fromtuberculosis. Four years later, Veza and Elias flee Nazi-ruled Vienna to London, where they lead an impoverished and extremely complicated marital life in exile.Spanning the major part of Elias’s struggle for literary recognition...

This sterling biography of Germany's greatest writer presents Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as if we are seeing him for the first time.The work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe has reverberated through two and a half centuries, altering the course of literature in ways both grand and intimate. No other writer so completely captivated the intellectual life of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, putting into language the anxieties and ambitions of a civil...

A Place in the Country is W. G. Sebald’s meditation on the six artists and writers who shaped his creative mind—and the last of this great writer’s major works to be translated into English.This edition includes more than 40 pieces of art, all originally selected by W. G. Sebald.This extraordinary collection of interlinked essays about place, memory, and creativity captures the inner worlds of five authors and one painter. In his masterly ...

"An accessible, anecdotally rich" biography of the profoundly influential 19th century philosopher, author of Beyond Good and Evil and The Will to Power ( Kirkus Reviews).Friedrich Nietzsche was the most fearlessly provocative and original thinker in Western history. The protean diversity of his writings make him one of the most influential of modern philosophers, yet his often paradoxical statements can be properly understood only within...

"Immensely readable...a significant piece of scholarship."—Fred Volkmer, New York SunHe would become one of the most important poets of the twentieth century; she a muse of Europe's fin-de-siècle thinkers and artists. In this collection of letters, a finalist for the PEN USA translation award, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, a writer and intellectual fourteen years his senior, pen a relationship that spans thirty years and shifting boun...

#1 New York Times BestsellerIn this gripping WWII historical nonfiction, Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her into a ghetto and then into a slave labor camp. When she returned home months later, she knew she would become a hunted woman and went underground, a true story of survival by hiding in plain sight. With the help of a Christian friend, she emerged in Munich as Grete Denner. There she met Werner Vetter, a Naz...