"With great erudition and profound engagement [this history] has made it possible for us to come closer to understanding Prague." ―Larry Wolff, The New York Times Book ReviewPrague is at the core of everything both wonderful and terrible in Western history, but few people truly understand this city's unique culture. In Prague in Black and Gold, Peter Demetz strips away sentimentalities and distortions and shows how Czechs, German...

The acclaimed historian and author of Prague in Black and Gold shares a dramatic account of life in Czechoslovakia's capital under Nazi occupation.From 1939 to 1945, Czechoslovakia endured as a Nazi Protectorate. Peter Demetz lived in Prague at that time, designated a "first-degree half-Jew," according to the Nazis' terrible categories. In Prague in Danger, he joins his objective chronicle of the city under Germa...

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...

Discover the delightfully heartwarming and life-affirming bestseller about one man's unlikely journey through love, perfect for fans of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely FineTHE INTERNATIONAL MILLION COPY BESTSELLER'I couldn't put this book down. It's one of the most quirky and endearing romances I've ever read. I laughed the whole way through' SOPHIE KINSELLA'Brilliant, important, good-hearted' GUA...

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...

THE RUNAWAY GLOBAL BESTSELLER'Gripping, enthralling - a top-notch thriller and a compulsive read.' SJ Watson, bestselling author of BEFORE I GO TO SLEEPRachel catches the same commuter train every morning. She knows it will wait at the same signal each time, overlooking a row of back gardens. She's even started to feel like she knows the people who live in one of the houses. 'Jess and Jason', she calls them. Their life - as...

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...

The "monumental" New York Times bestseller in which a Catholic explores the problem of anti-Semitism through Church history ( The Washington Post).A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable BookIn this "masterly history" ( Time), National Book Award-winning author James Carroll maps the profoundly troubling two-thousand-year course of the Church's battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of ...