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The latest work by Peter Handke chronicles a day in life of an aging actor as he makes his way on foot from the outskirts of a great metropolis into its center.

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Begins with a man who receives a startling call from his ex-wife. She's in the hospital, awaiting a cancer diagnosis. His mind races as he suddenly realizes he must find out whether she was contaminated by fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

When Kurt Weber inherits his great-uncle‿s lakeside house, he finds traces of the dark secrets of his family‿s past. The early inhabitants of the house haunt his dreams nightly. And one day a ghostlike woman appears before him, hiding herself in a room that had been kept locked throughout his childhood. Inside, Kurt finds a hidden stash of photographs, letters, and documents. As he deciphers them, he gradually understands the degree of complicity in wartime horrors by his family and among his neighbors. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the entire village adheres to an old and widely understood agreement not to expose the many members in the community who had been involved with a nearby prison camp during World War II. This knowledge wraps the entire community‿those involved, and those who know of the involvement‿in inescapable guilt for generations. Translated from the original German by Tess Lewis, Ludwig‿s Room is a story of love, betrayal, honor, and cowardice, as well as the burden of history and the moral demands of the present.

Offers a collection of poems where an exacting eye is cast on nature. The poet's perspective is observant, stringent, and very human, bringing both intellect and emotion to the page. Translated by Joseph Given, the verses are in turn scrutinizing, wistful about the brutality of nature, and rejoicing in the simple wonder of life.

IN

When translator Claire Methuen travels back to her hometown of Dinard for a family wedding, she runs into her old piano teacher Madame Ladon. After befriending the ageing woman, Methuen begins to toy with the idea of a permanent return to live in Brittany. She becomes increasingly obsessed by her childhood sweetheart, Simon Quelen, who, now married and a father, still lives in a village further down the coast where he is the local pharmacist and mayor. Having moved into a farmhouse, she soon spends her days walking the heathland above the cliffs and spying on him as he sails in the bay. As she walks, she is at one with the land of her childhood and youth, “her skull emptying into the landscape.â€? And when her younger brother Paul comes to join her there, the web of solidarities is further enriched.   This is a tale of dramatic episodes, told through intermingling voices and the atmospherics of the austere Breton landscape. Ultimately, it is a story of obsessional love and of a parallel sibling bond that is equally strong. Â

Richly imagined and recounted in vivid prose of extraordinary beauty, this book is a stunning illustration of Ransmayr‿s talent for imbuing a captivating tale with intense metaphorical, indeed metaphysical force. The world‿s most powerful man, Qiánlóng, emperor of China, invites the famous eighteenth-century clockmaker Alister Cox to his court in Beijing. There, in the heart of the Forbidden City, the Englishman and his assistants are to build machines that mark the passing of time as a child or a condemned man might experience it and that capture the many shades of happiness, suffering, love, and loss that come with that passing. Mystified by the rituals of a rigidly hierarchical society dominated by an unimaginably wealthy, god-like ruler, Cox musters all his expertise and ingenuity to satisfy the emperor‿s desires. Finally, Qiánlóng, also known by the moniker Lord of Time, requests the construction of a clock capable of measuring eternity‿a perpetuum mobile. Seizing this chance to realize a long-held dream and honor the memory of his late beloved daughter, yet conscious of the impossibility of his task, Cox sets to work. As the court is suspended in a never-ending summer, festering with evil gossip about the monster these foreigners are creating, the Englishmen wonder if they will ever escape from their gilded cage. More than a meeting of two men, one isolated by power, the other by grief, this is an exploration of mortality and a virtuoso demonstration that storytelling alone can truly conquer time. Â

An intensely personal and profoundly moving review of Bonnefoy's childhood memories. In December 2015, six months before his death at the age of 93, Yves Bonnefoy concluded what was to be his last major text in prose, L'écharpe rouge, translated here as The Red Scarf. In this unique book, described by the poet as "an anamnesis"--a formal act of commemoration--Bonnefoy undertakes, at the end of his life, a profoundly moving exegesis of some fragments written in 1964. These fragments lead him back to an unspoken, lifelong anxiety: "My most troubling memory, when I was between ten and twelve years old, concerns my father, and my anxiety about his silence." Bonnefoy offers an anatomy of his father's silence, and of the melancholy that seemed to take hold some years into his marriage to the poet's mother. At the heart of this book is the ballad of Elie and Hélène, the poet's parents. It is the story of their lives together in the Auvergne, and later in Tours, seen through the eyes of their son--the solitary boy's intense but inchoate experience, reviewed through memories of the now elderly man. What makes The Red Scarf indispensable is the intensely personal nature of the material, casting its slant light, a setting sun, on all that has gone before.

A unique and modern approach to money, wealth, greed, and financial ignorance presented via a story of a family in the Munich suburbs. The Federmanns live a pleasant but painfully normal life in the Munich suburbs. All that the three children really know about money is that there‿s never enough of it in their family.   Every so often, their impish Great-Aunt Fé descends on the city. After repeated cycles of boom and bust, profligacy and poverty, the grand old lady has become enormously wealthy and lives alone in a villa on the shore of Lake Geneva. But what does Great-Aunt Fé want from the Federmanns, her only surviving relatives? This time, she invites the children to tea at her luxury hotel where she spoils, flummoxes, and inspires them. Dismayed at their ignorance of the financial ways of the world, she gives them a crash course in economics that piques their curiosity, unsettles their parents, and throws open a whole new world. The young Federmanns are for once taken seriously and together they try to answer burning questions: Where does money come from? Why are millionaires and billionaires never satisfied? And why are those with the most always showered with more?   In this rich volume, the renowned poet, translator, and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger turns his gimlet eye on the mechanisms and machinations of banks and politicians‿the human greed, envy, and fear that fuels the global economy. A modern, but moral-less fable, Money, Money, Money! is shot through with Enzensberger‿s trademark erudition, wit, and humanist desire to cut through jargon and forearm his readers against obscurantism. Â

Marked by powerful and evocative prose, Ferenc Barnás‿s novel tells the fascinating story of a young man‿s journey through his strange obsessions towards possible recovery. The unnamed narrator is the parasite, feeding off others‿ ailments, but he is also a host who attracts people with the most peculiar manias. He confesses, almost amiably, his decadent attraction as a young adolescent to illnesses and hospitals. The real descent into his private, hallucinatory hell begins after his first sexual encounter; he becomes a compulsive masturbator, and then a compulsive fornicator. But to his horror, he realizes that casual sex is not casual at all for him‿each one-night stand results in insane jealousy: he imagines previous lovers hovering over him every time he makes love to a woman.   When he gets to know a woman referred to as L., he thinks his demons may have finally subsided. But when he hears of her past, the jealousy returns. He seeks relief through writing‿by weaving an imagined tale of L.‿s amorous adventures. What will he do with this strange manuscript, and can it bring him healing? A breathtaking blend of Dostoevskian visions, episodes of madness, and intellectual fervor, all delivered in precise, lucid prose, The Parasite is a novel that one cannot escape. Â

Translation of: Derniers jours de Mandelstam.

At once a narrative biography and a medical history, Manon's World tells the story of a haunted young woman caught in the middle of a love triangle in interwar Germany. Manon Gropius (1916-1935) was the daughter of Alma Mahler, the widow of Gustav Mahler, and the architect Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, and the stepdaughter of the writer Franz Werfel. In Manon's World, James Reidel explores the life and death of a child at the center of a broken love triangle. The story takes a unique course, describing a peripheral figure but in a context where her significance and centrality in the lives of her famous parents and circles comes into relief. Reidel reveals a neglected and fascinating life in a world gone by--Vienna, Venice, and Berlin of the interwar years. Not just a narrative biography, Manon's World is also a medical history of the polio that killed Manon and a personal cultural history of the aspirations projected on her--and seen as lost by such keen observers as Elias Canetti, who devoted two chapters of his Nobel Prize-winning memoirs to his encounters with Manon and her funeral. That event led Alban Berg to dedicate his signature Violin Concerto "to an angel." Reidel reveals a more complex image of a young woman who desired to be an actress and artist in her own right despite being her mother's intended protégé, an inspiration to her father who rarely saw her, and her stepfather Franz Werfel, who obsessively wrote her into his novels, beginning with The Forty Days of Musa Dagh and as a revenant in all the books that followed.

Originally published between 1910 and 1917, and collected in book form in 1923, The Epic of Damarudhar story cycle occupies an important and unique position in the history of Bengali literature. Tackling cosmology and mythology, class and caste abuse, nativist demagoguery and the harsh reality of rural poverty, all by means of unrelentingly fierce black comedy, Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay's cycle of seven stories featuring the raconteur Damarudhar remains prescient social commentary to this day. With its generic fusion of tall tales, science, myth, politics, and the absurd, the work also announces the emergence of the genre of modern fantasy in Bengal. A detailed introduction, bibliography, and extensive annotation bring to life the context for these stories, highlighting key intertexts, political nuances, and important mythological references. This volume also contains the first translation of a rare biographical piece on the author, which includes long autobiographical parts written by Trailokyanath himself. Carefully translated and thoroughly researched, this volume will introduce a trenchant Indian voice to the English-language readership.

In Japan there is a legend that anyone who folds one thousand paper cranes will have their wishes realized. But folding cranes, and the meditative, solemn care that it involves, has come to mean more than just an exercise in wish making. Origami cranes have become a symbol of renewal, atonement, and warning. Their symbolism may have emerged out of Japan‿s particular mythology and history, but they do not belong to any one nation. The crane is a migratory bird that crosses borders and makes its home with scant regard to the blood-soaked lines that humans have drawn on maps. This anthology uses origami cranes as a way for some of India‿s best-known writers, poets, and artists to form a shared civic space for a conversation about the fault lines in India at a time of darkness. The twenty-three pieces collected here encompass reportage, stories, poems, memoir, and polemic‿the kind of complex and enriching diversity that India demands and deserves. The paper crane becomes a motif of connection, beauty, and reclamation in an otherwise degraded country, enabling those who fight with words to become the best army they can be.

When Keith Stapperpfenning and his family give their grandfather the trip of a lifetime - an all-expenses-paid holiday to any destination in the world - the eccentric old man arbitrarily chooses China, and he asks Keith to accompany him. But when his grandfather dies unexpectedly, Keith is left to continue the farce alone.

Introduces us to W, a mere hangeron in East Berlin's postmodern underground literary scene. This title offers a black comedy about state power and the seductions of surveillance. Its vision seems especially relevant in the world of cameras on every train, bus, and corner.

Born in the former East Germany, Volker Braun is a humane, witty, brave, and disappointed poet. In the East, his poetry upheld the voice of the individual imagination and identified with a utopian possibility that never became reality. This is a selection of poems from the distinguished, half-century-long career of German poet Volker Braun.

For much of her career, Elfriede Jelinek has been maligned in the press for both her unrelenting critique of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. Despite this, her central role in shaping contemporary literature was finally recognized in 2004 with the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Although she is an internationally recognized playwright, Jelinek's plays are difficult to find in English, which makes this new volume, which includes "Rechnitz: The Exterminating Angel," "The Merchant's Contracts" and "Charges (The Supplicants)" all the more valuable. In "Rechnitz," a chorus of messengers reports on the circumstances of the massacre of 180 Jews, an actual historical event that took place near the Austrian/Hungarian border town of Rechnitz. In "The Merchant's Contracts," Jelinek brings us a comedy of economics, where the babble and media spin of spectators leave small investors alienated and bearing the brunt of the economic crisis. In "Charges (The Supplicants)," Jelinek offers a powerful analysis of the plight of refugees, from ancient times to the present. She responds to the immeasurable suffering among those fleeing death, destruction, and political suppression in their home countries and, drawing on sources as widely separated in time and intent as up-to-the-minute blog postings and Aeschylus's "The Supplicants," Jelinek asks what refugees want, how we as a society view them, and what political, moral, and personal obligations they impose on us.

Collected in their entirety for the first time in English, the insightful texts in Night Music show the breadth of Adorno's musical understanding and reveal an overlooked side to this significant thinker.