'I've been summoned, Thursday, ten sharp.' So begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before, but this time she knows it will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. 'Marry me', the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country.As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot while trying to flee to Hungary; to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them; to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers; and to Paul, her lover and the one person she can trust. In her distraction, she misses her stop and finds herself on an unfamiliar street.And what she discovers there suddenly puts her fear of the appointment into chilling perspective. Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment is a pitiless rendering of the terrors of a crushing regime.

Romania, the last months of the dictator's regime. Adina is a young schoolteacher. Paul is a musician. Clara, Adina's friend, works in a wire factory. Pavel is Clara's lover. But one of them works for the secret police and is reporting on the group. One day Adina returns home to discover that her fox fur rug has had its tail cut off. On another day, a hindleg. Then a foreleg. The mutilation is a sign that she is being tracked - the fox was ever the hunter. Images of photographic precision combine to form a kaleidoscope of reflections, deflections and deceit. Adina and her friends struggle to keep living in a world permeated with fear, where even the eyes of a cat seem complicit with the watchful eye of the state, and where it's hard to tell the victim apart from the perpetrator.

Simon Schama, in defence of the essay in the age of Twitter, writes: 'The self-propulsion of a ranging intelligence is the dynamo that drives a powerful essay; the headlong gallop of thought to a destination the reader can't predict and which may not have occurred to the writer when he began.' That power, that propulsion, that surprise is evident in every one of this selection of the very finest of the essays produced over the past 20 years by the Romanian-German Nobel Laureate Herta Muller. She interrogates Communist society - especially in its bizarre Romanian Ceausescu variation - and matters of complicity, secrecy, betrayal, guilt, responsibility, resistance and the power of literature. Her writing is bewitching and convincing; her approach is unswerving, unsparing and undeluded. Her reader is grateful. These are among the most powerful demonstrations of the pen's might exceeding the sword's to be produced in the last forty years in Europe.

To create the poems in this collection, Nobel Prize-winner Herta Muller cut up countless newspapers and magazines in search of striking phrases, words, or even fragments of words, which she then arranged in a the form of a collage. Father's on the Phone with the Flies presents seventy-three of Muller's collage poems for the first time in English translation, alongside full-color reproductions of the originals. Muller takes full advantage of the collage form, generating poems rich in wordplay, ambiguity, and startling, surreal metaphors the disruption and dislocation at their core rendered visible through stark contrasts in color, font, and type size. Liberating words from conformity and coercion, Muller renders them fresh and invests them forcefully with personal experience. Sure to thrill any fan of contemporary literature, Father's on the Phone with the Flies is an unexpected, exciting work from one of the most protean writers ever to win the Nobel.

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2009 'Just as the father in the house in which we live is our father, so Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu is the father of our country. And just as the mother in the house in which we live is our mother, so Comrade Elena Ceausescu is the mother of our country. Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu is the father of our children. All the children love comrade Nicolae and comrade Elena, because they are their parents.' The Passport is a beautiful, haunting novel whose subject is a German village in Romania caught between the stifling hopelessness of Ceausescu's dictatorship and the glittering temptations of the West. Stories from the past are woven together with the problems Windisch, the village miller, faces after he applies for permission to migrate to West Germany. Herta Muller describes with poetic attention the dreams and superstitions, conflicts and oppression of a forgotten region, the Banat, in the Danube Plain. In sparse, lyrical language, Herta Muller captures the forlorn plight of a trapped people. This edition is translated by Martin Chalmers, with a new foreword by Paul Bailey. Also by Herta Muller: Nadirs, The Land of Green Plums, The Appointment, and The Hunger Angel.

In 1987 Fabio Ponzio decided to embark on a photographic odyssey in search of Eastern Europe. When he arrived in Poland the country was on the verge of collapse. There was little food in the shops and the queues to buy bread were immense. In Ceausescu's Romania, people's lives were reduced to a succession of dark days; the Securitate wielded absolute control and used informants, bribery and violence to beat any instinct for freedom out of individuals. In the same period, in Yugoslavia, the beginnings of what was to become the catastrophe of successive years were being laid out, while the West looked on in supreme indifference. In the autumn of 1989, everything changed. The various regimes of the communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe began to collapse in Budapest, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Sofia and Bucharest in a domino effect that continued in Albania and ended two years later in the Soviet Union. Ponzio continued his travels across an immense territory with a Leica, three Nikons and 100 rolls of film, in search of the people of the East, documenting the old energy that had been fortified through pain and sacrifice, now joined by a new energy, full of hope. Year after year, Ponzio returned to capture the many faces and stark differences of the other Europe, in search of the elements that make up the shared destiny of the peoples of Eastern Europe. Collected here are his stunning portraits of their traditions and faith, humility and courage, vulnerability and survival.

From the winner of the IMPAC Award and the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, a fierce and devastating novel about a young woman's discovery of betrayal in the most intimate reaches of her life
"I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp." Thus begins a day in the life of a young factory worker during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. "Marry me," the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of Romania.
As each tram stop brings the young woman closer to the appointment, her thoughts stray to her father and his infidelities; to her friend Lilli, shot trying to flee to Hungary; to her grandparents, deported after her own husband informed on them; and to Paul, her lover, her one source of trust despite his drunkenness. In her distraction, she misses her stop and finds herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the interrogation pale by comparison.
Bone-spare and intense, "The Appointment" powerfully renders the humiliating terrors of a crushing regime and its corrosive effects on family and friendship, sex and love.

Set in Romania at the height of Ceausescu's reign of terror, The Land of Green Plums tells the story of a group of young students, each of whom has left the impoverished provinces in search of better prospects in the city. It is a profound illustration of a totalitarian state which comes to inhabit every aspect of life; to the extent that everyone, event the strongest, must either bend to the oppressors or resist them and perish.

Juxtaposing reality and fantasy, nightmares and dark laughter, "Nadirs" is a collection of largely autobiographical stories based on Herta Muller's childhood in the Romanian countryside. The individual tales reveal a child's often nightmarish impressions of life in her village. Seamlessly mixing reality with dream-like images, they brilliantly convey the inner, troubled life of a child and at the same time capture the violence and corruption of life under an oppressive state.

Mit der erstmaligen Herausgabe und Kommentierung der 77 Briefe Cosima von Bulows (seit 1870 verh. Wagner) an ihre Berliner Jugendfreundin Ellen Franz (verh. Helene von Heldburg) erschliessen Maren Goltz und Herta Muller einen bisher unbekannten, Quellenbestand, der vollig neue Einblicke in die Welt der beiden fur die Kulturgeschichte so bedeutenden Frauen erlaubt. Obwohl die Gegenkorrespondenz von Ellen Franz - der Schauspielerin und spateren Frau des Meininger Theaterherzogs Georg II. - nicht uberliefert ist, belegen die Briefe aus dem Zeitraum von 1859 bis 1912 nicht nur eine der Forschung bisher verborgen gebliebene Lebensfreundschaft zwischen der Konigin (Cosima) und dem Taubchen (Ellen). Sie ermoglichen auch einen differenzierteren Blick auf Cosimas Gefuhlswelt, ihr Verhaltnis zum Vater Franz Liszt und auf ihre Ehe mit Hans von Bulow. Vor allem jedoch lassen sie wichtige Facetten ihrer Personlichkeit sichtbar werden: ihre hohe Bildung, ihr intellektuelles Niveau und ihre grosse Theaterleidenschaft. Inspiriert durch das Meininger Hoftheater, pragte Cosima Wagner den Bayreuther Buhnenstil in entscheidendem Masse mit - vor und nach dem Tod Richard Wagners. In this first-ever publication of seventy-seven letters written by Cosima von Bulow (who changed her name to Cosima Wagner after marrying again in 1870) to her long-standing Berlin friend Ellen Franz (who after her marriage became Helene von Heldburg), Maren Goltz and Herta Muller tap an extremely informative yet previously unknown source of fresh insights into the worlds of these two women so important in cultural history. Although the replies from Ellen Franz - an actress who married theatre aficionado Duke Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen - have not survived, the letters spanning 1859-1912 do far more than demonstrate the existence of a lifelong friendship between the 'Queen' (Cosima von Bulow/Wagner) and the 'Chick' (Ellen Franz) previously unknown to scholars. They also enable a more nuanced view of Cosima's"

A masterful new novel from the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize, hailed for depicting the "landscape of the dispossessed" with "the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose" (Nobel Prize Committee)

It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the labor colony: one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread.

In "The Hunger Angel," Nobel laureate Herta Muller calls upon her unique combination of poetic intensity and dispassionate precision to conjure the distorted world of the labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity. She has given Leo the language to express the inexpressible, as hunger sharpens his senses into an acuity that is both hallucinatory and profound. In scene after disorienting scene, the most ordinary objects accrue tender poignancy as they acquire new purpose--a gramophone box serves as a suitcase, a handkerchief becomes a talisman, an enormous piece of casing pipe functions as a lovers' trysting place. The heart is reduced to a pump, the breath mechanized to the rhythm of a swinging shovel, and coal, sand, and snow have a will of their own. Hunger becomes an insatiable angel who haunts the camp, but also a bare-knuckled sparring partner, delivering blows that keep Leo feeling the rawest connection to life.

Muller has distilled Leo's struggle into words of breathtaking intensity that take us on a journey far beyond the Gulag and into the depths of one man's soul.

The 2009 Nobel Literature Prize winner. Herta Muller's only Japanese translation. In Japanese. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.