Originally published in 1957, this volume brings together a collection of essays and hard to source translations on both well and lesser known German writers and poets, including Hölderlin, Benn, Mann and Nietzsche. The essays are linked by a consideration of the tension between the desire for what Thomas Mann called ‘the miracle of ingeniousness regained’ and the constrains of reason. The book shows how this tension contributes toward the prophetic nature of so much 18th and 19th Century ...

Five enduring works that demonstrate Goethe’s mastery of poetic form and engagement with neoclassical idealsThis volume presents the four plays and the narrative poem that, along with Faust, established Goethe as one of the masters of European verse drama and epic. These timeless works display a balance between poetic form and ethical sensibility that characterizes much of Goethe’s work during the era of Weimar Classicism. Verse Plays and Epic fea...

Published by Methuen Drama, the collected dramatic works of Bertolt Brecht are presented in the most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English language.Volume One of Brecht's Collected Plays contains Brecht's first performed stage works. Baal is inspired by Brecht's student life in Augsburg and follows the life of a young poet on the rocky road to inspiration; Drums in the Night was written in response to Brecht's experience as a me...

Set against the strikingly beautiful backdrop of the Vosges mountains, Lenz tells the tale of the real-life writer J.M.R. Lenz's nineteen-day stay in Waldersbach in 1778, describing his wanderings around the mountainous surroundings and his worsening fits of madness, eventually culminating in his removal, under guard, to Strasbourg.Valued both as a chillingly convincing exploration of the reality of paranoid schizophrenia and an influential forerunner of literary modernism, this existentia...

Want to impress your parents? Your friends? Your teachers? The college admissions office? Of course you do!Brain Spark is a collection of short readings on major topics that are critical for a well-rounded mind. Focusing on people, places, and important concepts, Brain Spark helps teenagers and young adults make sense of adult conversations and news events.The stories are short, fun and easy to read. In addition, the information sticks than...

Eight early plays by Goethe that revolutionized German dramaGoethe’s early plays bear witness to his urgent desire to enliven German theater, an ambition that followed him to the National Theater in Weimar, where he was named director in the early 1790s. Early Verse Drama and Prose Plays brings together eight of these plays, written between 1771 and 1787. Not only do they demonstrate Goethe’s unprecedented versatility in experimenting with new forms of dra...

Published by Methuen Drama, the collected dramatic works of Bertolt Brecht are presented in the most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English language.This second volume of Brecht's Collected Plays brings together some of his most glittering Berlin successes including The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The Seven Deadly Sins, Man Equals Man and The Elephant Calf. The Thre...

The most comprehensive and authoritative editions of Brecht's plays in the English languageVolume Three of Brecht's Collected Plays includes St Joan of the Stockyards - a play which recasts St Joan as Joan Dark springing hope into the hearts of factory workers at the mercy of meatpacker king Pierpont Mauler threatening cuts in the Depression; and the Lehrstücke or short 'didactic' pieces written during the years 1929 to 1933, are some of his most experimental work. Lindbergh's Flig...

Now in paperback, the long-awaited volume of Brecht's classic plays from the 1930sVolume 4 of Brecht's Collected Plays contains works from the 1930s, straddling fateful years in German political and cultural history - as well as in Brecht's own life. Round Heads and Pointed Heads, based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, is a powerful political allegory on Nazi racial policy and conditions in the Germany Brecht had to leave in 1933. The Trial of Lucullus

A new edition published on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Baldwin’s death, including a new introduction by an important contemporary writerSince its original publication in 1955, this first nonfiction collection of essays by James Baldwin remains an American classic. His impassioned essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written.“A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, wr...

The Swiss writer Robert Walser is one of the quiet geniuses of twentieth-century literature. Largely self-taught and altogether indifferent to worldly success, Walser wrote a range of short stories, essays, as well as four novels, of which Jakob von Gunten is widely recognized as the finest. The book is a young man's inquisitive and irreverent account of life in what turns out to be the most uncanny of schools. It is the work of an outsider artist, a writer of uncompromising origi...

A self-portrait of a great writer 's rise and fall, intensely personal and etched with Fitzgerald's signature blend of romance and realism.The Crack-Up tells the story of Fitzgerald's sudden descent at the age of thirty-nine from glamorous success to empty despair, and his determined recovery. Compiled and edited by Edmund Wilson shortly after F. Scott Fitzgerald's death, this revealing collection of his essays—as well as letters to and from Gertrude Stein...