Bøker av Breon Mitchell

An exciting historical novel set in the early 20th Century, about a black African leader and a bloody civil war in German-occupied Southwest Africa. Morenga, an early novel by Uwe Timm (Headhunter, The Invention of Curried Sausage), engages the mind on many levelshistorical, political, human. Set in German South West Africa in the first decade of the 20th century, it recounts the conflict between the colonial German Empire and the rebellious Africans of the Hottentot and Herero tribes led by the legendary Morenga. A daring and brilliant military tactician referred to as "the Herero bastard," he was fluent in several languages and by all reports a man of compassion, intelligence, and integrity leading his people towards freedom. Even though his revolt is suppressed and by the novel's end he is hunted down and killed, his importance as one of Africa's historic figures is assured. Morenga has a fascinating story and Timm tells it with an ingenious mix of fact and fiction. Recounted through the eyes of Gottschalk, an engaging fictional military veterinarian, the narrative blends quotations from actual historic sources with gripping accounts of everyday life and military excursions. As he has repeatedly shown himself to be, Timm is a master storyteller, and his imagined scenes and characters are as real as the factual material he weaves into the story. The parallels between past events and later German history with its notions of the Untermensch (subhuman) and racial inferiority are subtly brought to mind while significant philosophical, political, and human issues are at play. Morenga is an intriguing novel of scope and significance and it has been well served by Breon Mitchell's fine translation.

Siegfried Lenz is one of West Germany's foremost writers, ranking in popularity as well as critical esteem with Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll. In the United States, his stature is based primarily on the novel The German Lesson-a modern classic reissued by New Directions in 1986-but he is also considered a master of the short story, perhaps the best of his postwar generation. The Selected Stories of Siegfried Lenz, edited and translated by Breon Mitchell, is the first comprehensive gathering of the writer's short fiction ever to appear in English. In tone, the stories range from compassionate reflections on the human condition to gentle, humorous tales of prewar country life, to high comedy as well as spare, direct narratives. The twenty-six stories-roughly a third of Lenz's total-are grouped as "Tales of Our Times," "Tales from the Village," and "German Lessons."

A new translation of the only novel by lauded Romanian literary critic Matei CălinescuAn NYRB Classics Original Ugly, unkempt, a haunter of low dives who begs for a living and lives on the street, Zacharias Lichter exists for all that in a state of unlikely rapture. After being engulfed by a divine flame as a teenager, Zacharias has devoted his days to doing nothing at all—apart, that is, from composing the odd poem he immediately throws away and consorting with a handful of stray friends: Poldy, for example, the catatonic alcoholic whom Zacharias considers a brilliant philosopher, or another more vigorous barfly whose prolific output of pornographic verses has won him the nickname of the Poet. Zacharias is a kind of holy fool, but one whose foolery calls in question both social convention and conventional wisdom. He is as much skeptic as ecstatic, affirming above all the truth of perplexity. This of course is what makes him a permanent outrage to the powers that be, be they reactionary or revolutionary, and to all other self-appointed champions of morality who are blind to their own absurdity. The only thing that scares Zacharias is that all-purpose servant of conformity, the psychiatrist.This Romanian classic, originally published under the brutally dictatorial Ceauşescu regime, whose censors initially let it pass because they couldn’t make head or tail of it, is as delicious and telling an assault on the modern world order as ever.