As a young writer of blazing promise, Felix Hartlaub went missing in the final days of the Second World War, leaving behind diaries, notes and incomplete drafts that provide a singularly evocative portrait of life in wartime.From 1941, Hartlaub was posted in various Nazi military command headquarters, a historian tasked with writing the Wehrmacht's official record of the war. In private, he wrote the disaffected, ruthlessly clear-eyed and often beautiful fragments that make up ...

A psychic portrait of post-Wall Germany, from the most important German poet writing today.Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant poet to emerge from the former East Germany. Though he is a poet who is not expressly political, his work emerges from a tumultuous Germany, one where the poet confronts time and history head-on and not only in the abstract.The thirty-nine poems that make up Variations on No Theme were initially p...

In these 9 exquisite, moving stories from “one of Europe’s most exciting writers” (New York Times Book Review), people struggle to connect in a cold, uneasy world.Looking to escape his past, a Swiss ski instructor relocates to a German resort, where he develops an ambiguous bond with an older woman.An unusual new job unsettles a failed actress, as her character’s tragic story bleeds into her own life.When their son’s obsession with Mars One...

“In a brilliant translation of this great German novel, Michael Hofmann has illuminated a dark corner of recent European history. A forgotten masterpiece.”—Evening StandardDeath in Rome tells the story of four members of a German family—a former SS officer, a young man preparing for the priesthood, a composer, and a government administrator—reunited by chance in the decaying beauty of postwar Rome. A chilling account of Nazis after the war, here t...

A documentary filmmaker uncovers the secrets of an enigmatic author in this subtly enthralling novel from “one of Europe’s most exciting writers” (New York Times Book Review).For days, documentary filmmaker Andrea and her team have been waiting for Richard Wechsler in his Swiss hometown. During their first shoots in Paris, the famous writer had not wanted to reveal much about himself, and now the whole film threatens to fail.In the narrow streets a...

A bracing and darkly comic novel about a disgraced priest who finds himself haunted by his dead and disapproving father, this little-known classic of Swiss literature is impossible to forget.In a small town in Switzerland, Franz—ex-clergyman, ex-husband, current counselor of locals at loose ends—is being haunted by his recently deceased father, Klement. In life, Franz was caught cheating on his wife and defrocked, after which Klement never spoke to him again. In de...

On the anniversary of Wolfgang Koeppen’s 120th year, the two remaining works in his postwar trilogy in Michael Hofmann’s spectacular translationThe Hothouse traces the tragic final two days in the life of a minor German politician, Keetenheuve, a man disillusioned by the corruption of his country after World War II. Following his self-imposed exile during the war, Keetenheuve returns to the hothouse: the city of Bonn, the capital of that new postwar capita...

A newly discovered and translated jewel of a story from the Nobel laureateAt the end of the 1980s, a writer on a book tour, who very much resembles Grass, passes through East Germany and visits the Cathedral of Naumburg with its famous twelve donor statues. He invites the sculptor’s models to dinner—and they come, not as ghosts, but as they were when alive in the thirteenth century. Toward the end of dinner, after drinking an icy Coca-Cola, the model for the famed ...

**Named a Best Book of 2025 by BloombergFrom legendary filmmaker and author Werner Herzog, a compact, effervescent, and deeply personal exploration of art, philosophy, and history that unravels one of our most elusive and contested questions: What is truth—and how to find it in our “post-truth” era?**For over half a century, Werner Herzog has challenged, enriched, and expanded our understanding of the truth. His films and books have mixed fiction and nonfiction, do...

The inspiration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic film and that The Guardian named one of the "Top 100 Books of All Time," Berlin Alexanderplatz is considered one of the most important works of the Weimar Republic and twentieth century literature.Berlin Alexanderplatz, the great novel of Berlin and the doomed Weimar Republic, is one of the great books of the twentieth century, gruesome, farcical, and appalling, word drunk, pitchdark. In...

One of the great war memoirs, now featuring a foreword by the New York Times bestselling author of Matterhorn in time for the centenary of World War I and the Battle of the SommeA worldwide bestseller published shortly after the end of World War I, Storm of Steel is a memoir of astonishing power, savagery, and ashen lyricism. Itilluminates not only the horrors but also the fascination of total war, as seen through the eyes of an ordinary ...

Unformed Landscape begins in a small village on a fjord in the Finnmark, on the northeastern coast of Norway, where the borders between Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia lie covered in snow and darkness, where the real borders are between day and night, summer and winter, and between people. Here, a sensitive young woman like Kathrine finds few outlets for her desires. Half Norwegian, half Sami (an indigenous people), Kathrine works for the customs office inspecting the fishing ...