Now in paperback, a story of teenage love in Cold War-era Germany. For a fifteen-year-old, falling in love can eclipse everything else in the world, and make a few short weeks feel like a lifetime of experience. In Love Writ Large, Navid Kermani captures those intense feelings, from the emotional explosion of a first kiss to the staggering loss of a first breakup. As his teenage protagonist is wrapped up in these all-consuming feelings, however, Germany is in the crosshairs of the Cold War--and even the personal dramas of a small-town grammar school are shadowed by the threat of the nuclear arms race. Kermani's novel manages to capture these social tensions without sacrificing any of the all-consuming passion of first love and, in a unique touch, sets the boy's struggles within the larger frame of the stories and lives of numerous Arabic and Persian mystics. His becomes a timeless tale that reflects on the multiple ways love, loss, and risk weigh on our everyday lives.

A novel at once about social justice, romance, and Gramsci. Is it possible to fight for social justice if you’ve never really loved another person? Can you save a country if you’re in love? Forty-six-year-old Anton Stöver’s marriage is broken. His affairs are a thing of the past, and his career at the university has reached a dead end. One day he is offered the chance to go to Rome to conduct research on Antonio Gramsci, at one time the leading figure of Italian communism. Once there, he falls obsessively in love with a young woman he has met while continuing to focus his attention on the past: the frail and feverish Gramsci recovering in a Soviet sanatorium. Though Gramsci is supposed to save Italy from Mussolini’s seizure of power, he falls in love with a Russian comrade instead. With a subtle sense of the absurd, Nora Bossong explores the conflicts between having intense feelings for another and fighting for great ideals.

An intellectually stimulating yet accessible collection of short vignettes on Russia and Germany by Alexander Kluge. Not just in light of a contested pipeline during the war in Ukraine but also after centuries of both exchange and rejection, Russia and Germany were and are as far away from each other as they are intrinsically linked. The geopolitical present seems critical, the signs pointing towards conflict and polarity. In this hot climate, German author Alexander Kluge makes Russia the exclusive subject of his latest book, offering multiple perspectives: from that of the historical German patriots of the Napoleonic Wars of Liberation to the narrative point of view of Franz Kafka and Heiner Muller; from messianic yearning and utopian expectations of the twentieth century to the full-blown or near-miss catastrophes in the atomic age. Composed in Kluge's characteristic short-prose vignette style, interspersed with numerous images and often humorous asides, Russia Container is yet another brilliant and thought-provoking work from one of Europe's most prolific and deeply intellectual literary genius. The volume includes a preface specially written to engage with the current events in Ukraine, making Kluge's narratives even more timely and topical.

It's the early 1970s and Dion Katthusen, thirteen, is growing up fatherless in a small village in northern Germany. An only child plagued with a devastating stutter, Dion is ostracized by his peers and finds solace in the company of nature, collecting dragonflies in a moor filled with myths and legends. On the precipice of adulthood, Dion begins to spill the secrets of his heart his burning desire for faultless speech and his abiding relationship with his mother, a failed painter with secrets of her own. Even as Dion spins his story, his speech is filled with fissures and holes much like the swampy earth that surrounds him. Nature, though so often sublime, can also be terribly cruel.Moor is Dion's story a story of escaping the quicksand of loneliness and of the demands we make on love, even as those surrounding us are hurt in their misguided attempts to bear our suffering. Powerfully tuned to the relationship between human and nature, mother and son, Moor is a mysterious and experimental portrait of childhood. Written by up-and-coming German novelist Gunther Geltinger, the novel received critical acclaim in Germany and is now presented in English for the first time by translator Alexander Booth. Evocative and bold, Dion's story emerges from the forces of nature, his voice rising from the ground beneath the reader's feet, not soon to be forgotten.

A twist on the Irish literary classic Ulysses, told through Nicolas Mahler's distinctive graphic novel style. Dublin, 16 June 1904: through a day in the life of the advertising agent Leopold Bloom and the sensations of the ordinary, James Joyce created a maximal book from a minimum of matter. Ulysses, the most important novel of modernity, is a defining book of the twentieth century. Joyce's creation-also spectacularly innovative in form-inspired Nicolas Mahler to attempt a literary retelling that is not a mere illustration or adaption of the novel but an independent and equally as inventive work. Using comics, Mahler transforms the various literary techniques of the original. He assembles his images with humorous and philosophical verve, quoting and rambling along in the spirit of Joyce. With this graphic interpretation of the modern classic, which also constitutes a homage to the golden era of the newspaper comic strip, Ulysses can be newly discovered in a delightfully unexpected form.

German author Friedrich Ani combines deep sorrow, human darkness, and breath-taking tension in his latest crime novel. Happiness is extinguished completely one cold November night when eleven-year-old Lennard Grabbe fails to return home. Thirty-four days later, he is found to have been murdered, and former inspector Jakob Franck, the protagonist of Friedrich Ani's previous novel The Nameless Day, is entrusted with delivering the most horrible news any parent could ever dream of, setting off a chain reaction of grief among family and friends. As the special task force is unable to make any progress in the case and the family is unable to deal with the loss, Franck-driven by the need to bring them clarity but also by the painful memories of all the unsolved murder cases from when he was still on active duty-buries himself in witness statements and reports up to the point of exhaustion. He spends hours at the crime scene and employs his special technique of "thought sensitivity," an abstract, intuitive process that may very well lead him to the "fossil"-that crucial piece of information he needs to solve the case. Once again, Ani combines deep sorrow, human darkness, and breath-taking tension in a novel whose melancholy can hardly be surpassed.

A highly engaging exploration of existential questions, written in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic.   The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul confronts the reader with questions of existential meaning, questions rendered all the more potent by the backdrop of the Coronavirus pandemic: How fragile are we as human beings? How fragile are our societies? What is a “self,� an “I,�  a “community�? How are we to orient ourselves? And what, if any, role does commentary play? In a fashion that will be familiar to longtime admirers of Alexander Kluge, the book stretches both back in time to the medieval glossators of Bologna and forward into interstellar space with imagined travel to the moon Europa. Kluge’s characteristic brief, vignette-like prose passages are interspersed with images from his own film work and QR codes, forming a highly engaging, thoroughly contemporary read.  

Ju rgen Becker's The Sea in the Radio is a collection of "journal sentences" divided into three sections called notebooks. In this great concert of a novel, language has been pared down to a minimum: fragments, phrases, and short sentences combine and make up a life both banal and profound. It is a life in which many of the details remain unstated or, as in miniatures, float just beyond the edges of the frame. Though at first the narrative may seem to move in a relatively harmless manner, soon enough we begin to realize that the story to be told may indeed be more unsettling than we had suspected. The Sea in the Radio is a novel that bears witness not only to one's final years but also to one's place within history in general and Germany's cataclysmic twentieth-century past in particular.

A twist on the classic tale of Alice in Wonderland told through Nicolas Mahler's distinctive graphic novel style. Alice is back in Wonderland. Here she meets the White Rabbit, who leads her down into his rabbit hole in search of an illustrated edition of H. C. Artmann's Frankenstein in Sussex. Over the course of the novel, Alice repeatedly runs into the Rabbit, who quotes freely from other literary works by the likes of Herman Melville and E. M. Cioran. Unlike in Lewis Carroll's classic, Alice is not traveling the Wonderland we know. Rather, in Nicolas Mahler's whimsical graphic novel retelling, she is in a house deep beneath the ground. On subsequent floors, she encounters the famous creations of Lewis Carroll: the Hookah-Smoking Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Mock Turtle, and many others. One after the other, these creatures address the terrors of childhood and youth. It is only when Alice reaches the ground floor of the house that we arrive at the inevitable climax: face to face with Frankenstein's Monster.

An engaging exploration of romance focusing on disparate ages of lovers. Sunday evening, Tegel Airport, Berlin: A woman strikes up a conversation with a man, Robert Sturm, who is thirty-six years old and eighteen years her junior. He is on his way to Siberia and will return the following Saturday. She cannot wait . . . In 1981 she came to West Berlin as an eighteen-year-old to study medicine and met Viktor, who was twice her age. Though he opened the world up to her, he remained closed himself. At the turn of the millennium and thirty-six, she meets Johann. He is thirty-six too. They try to make a life together, but their jobs aren’t the only things that are precarious. Saturday morning, Tegel Airport again: For six days, her everyday life and her memories have become entwined. Why are the men in her life always thirty-six? Is she still the person she remembers? Or, being someone who knows their way around the mind, is she in fact what she has forgotten?  

A twist on the French literary classic In Search of Lost Time told through Nicolas Mahler's distinctive graphic novel style. Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most important works of French literature-if not the most important. Reading it can be life-changing. Nicolas Mahler's comic is not a retelling of this classic, nor a shortened version of Proust's monumental work. Rather, it is a surprisingly funny graphic novel, comically disrespectful of the celebrated work yet completely permeated by Proustian spirit. Complemented by his clear and sparse illustrations, Mahler's minimal nature of text use is easy on the eye, even for those uninitiated into graphic novels. For long-time fans of graphic novels, it is a perfect entry into a beloved literary classic. A compact picture stream through time and space, Mahler's In Search of Lost Time is a brilliantly complex house of mirrors replete with Proustian motives and perceptions.

For nearly half a century, German artist Max Neumann has worked to create, hone, and elaborate a visual vocabulary that is dark, compulsive, and forceful. A lifelong collaborator, Neumann's paintings have accompanied the work of Cees Nooteboom, Seamus Heaney, Fernando Pessoa, and Laszlo Krasznahorkai, among many others. In Poetry and Time, Neumann's haunting images are accompanied by a lyrical and penetrating text from poet Joachim Sartorius, who notes that a certain silence is at the very heart of poems, stating: "They know what it is they do, but do not say it." Exploring this mystery, he considers examples from Dickinson, Rilke, and Shakespeare, among others, and examines the realities of transience and mortality at the center of poems' reasons for being, their urge to form their own reality and abolish time while being inextricably bound to time. Sartorius's ruminations beautifully complement Neumann's series of thirty poignant paintings, making this volume is an extraordinarily rare and exquisite book.

Poetic prose meditations translated superbly into English.   Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker is widely considered one of the most important European poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The last book of hers to be published during her lifetime, as mornings and moosgreen I. Step to the window is an elliptical and, if at times cryptic, deeply personal, playful, and highly poetic collection of experiences, memories, dreams, desires, fears, visions, observations, and peregrinations through landscapes both real and imagined. The volume bears witness to her unique late lyrical style of pyrotechnical cut-up. Among many others, her beloved Derrida, Duchamp, Hölderlin, and Jean-Paul all appear, almost like guides, as Mayröcker bravely makes her way through infirmity, old age, and loneliness, prolonging her time as a prolific writer as much as possible.  

A novel at once about social justice, romance, and Gramsci. Is it possible to fight for social justice if you've never really loved another person? Can you save a country if you're in love? Forty-six-year-old Anton Stoever's marriage is broken. His affairs are a thing of the past, and his career at the university has reached a dead end. One day he is offered the chance to go to Rome to conduct research on Antonio Gramsci, at one time the leading figure of Italian communism. Once there, he falls obsessively in love with a young woman he has met while continuing to focus his attention on the past: the frail and feverish Gramsci recovering in a Soviet sanatorium. Though Gramsci is supposed to save Italy from Mussolini's seizure of power, he falls in love with a Russian comrade instead. With a subtle sense of the absurd, Nora Bossong explores the conflicts between having intense feelings for another and fighting for great ideals.

Now in paperback, the thrilling, psychological tale of a twenty-year-old cold case and the detective committed to solving it. After years on the job, police detective Jakob Franck has retired. Finally, the dead-with all their mysteries-will no longer have any claim on him. Or so he thinks. On a cold autumn afternoon, a case he thought he'd long put behind him returns to his life-and turns it upside down. The Nameless Day tells the story of that twenty-year-old case, which began with Franck carrying the news of the suicide of a seventeen-year-old girl to her mother, and holding her for seven hours as, in her grief, she said not a single word. Now her father has appeared, swearing to Franck that his daughter was murdered. Can Franck follow the cold trail of evidence two decades later to see whether he's telling the truth? Could he live with himself if he didn't? A psychological crime novel certain to thrill fans of Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbo, The Nameless Day is a masterpiece, a tightly plotted story of contemporary alienation, loss, and violence.

After years on the job, police detective Jakob Franck has retired. Finally, the dead with all their mysteries will no longer have any claim on him. Or so he thinks. On a cold autumn afternoon, a case he thought he'd long put behind him returns to his life and turns it upside down. The Nameless Day tells the story of that twenty-year-old case, which began with Franck carrying the news of the suicide of a seventeen-year-old girl to her mother, and holding her for seven hours as, in her grief, she said not a single word. Now her father has appeared, swearing to Franck that his daughter was murdered. Can Franck follow the cold trail of evidence two decades later to see whether he's telling the truth? Could he live with himself if he didn't? A psychological crime novel certain to thrill fans of Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbo, The Nameless Day is a masterpiece, a tightly plotted story of contemporary alienation, loss, and violence.

It's the early 1970s and Dion Katthusen, thirteen, is growing up fatherless in a small village in northern Germany. An only child plagued with a devastating stutter, Dion is ostracized by his peers and finds solace in the company of nature, collecting dragonflies in a moor filled with myths and legends. On the precipice of adulthood, Dion begins to spill the secrets of his heart-his burning desire for faultless speech and his abiding relationship with his mother, a failed painter with secrets of her own. Even as Dion spins his story, his speech is filled with fissures and holes-much like the swampy earth that surrounds him. Nature, though so often sublime, can also be terribly cruel. Moor is Dion's story-a story of escaping the quicksand of loneliness and of the demands we make on love, even as those surrounding us are hurt in their misguided attempts to bear our suffering. Powerfully tuned to the relationship between human and nature, mother and son, Moor is a mysterious and experimental portrait of childhood. Written by up-and-coming German novelist Gunther Geltinger, the novel received critical acclaim in Germany and is now presented in English for the first time by translator Alexander Booth. Evocative and bold, Dion's story emerges from the forces of nature, his voice rising from the ground beneath the reader's feet, not soon to be forgotten.

Widely considered to be among the most important Italian poets of the twentieth century, Sandro Penna was born and raised in Perugia but spent most of his life in Rome. Openly gay, Penna wrote verses celebrating homosexual love with lyrical elegance. His writing alternates between whimsy and melancholia, but it is always full of light. Juggling traditional Italian prosody and subject matter with their gritty urban opposites in taut, highly concentrated poems, Penna's lyrics revel in love and the eruption of Eros together with the extraordinary that can be found within simple everyday life. There is something ancient in Penna's poetry, and something Etruscan or Greek about the poems, though the landscape is most often of Rome: sensual yet severe, sinuous yet solid, inscrutable, intangible, and languorous, with a Sphinx-like and sun-soaked smile. Penna's city is eternal-a mythically decadent Rome that brings to mind Paris or Alexandria. And though the echoes resound-from Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Baudelaire to Leopardi, D'Annunzio, and Cavafy-the voice is always undeniably and wonderfully Penna's own.

Now in paperback, a story of teenage love in Cold War-era Germany. For a fifteen-year-old, falling in love can eclipse everything else in the world, and make a few short weeks feel like a lifetime of experience. In Love Writ Large, Navid Kermani captures those intense feelings, from the emotional explosion of a first kiss to the staggering loss of a first breakup. As his teenage protagonist is wrapped up in these all-consuming feelings, however, Germany is in the crosshairs of the Cold War-and even the personal dramas of a small-town grammar school are shadowed by the threat of the nuclear arms race. Kermani's novel manages to capture these social tensions without sacrificing any of the all-consuming passion of first love and, in a unique touch, sets the boy's struggles within the larger frame of the stories and lives of numerous Arabic and Persian mystics. His becomes a timeless tale that reflects on the multiple ways love, loss, and risk weigh on our everyday lives.