In the tradition of such masterpieces of historical fiction as Mary Renault's "The King Must Die" East German writer Christa Wolf movingly retells the story of the fall of Troy - but from the point of view of the woman whose visionary powers earned her contempt and scorn. Written as a result of the author's Greek travels and studies, "Cassandra" speaks to us in a pressing monologue whose inner focal points are patriarchy and war. In the four accompanying pieces, which take the form of travel reports, journal entries, and a letter, Wolf describes the novel's genesis. Incisive and intelligent, the entire volume represents an urgent call to examine the past in order to insure a future.

Cassandra, daughter of the King of Troy, is endowed with the gift of prophecy but fated never to be believed. After ten years of brutal war, Troy has fallen to the Greek army, and Cassandra is now a prisoner of war, shackled outside the gates of a foreign fortress, Agamemnon's Mycenae. Through memories of her childhood and reflections on the long years of conflict, Cassandra pieces together the legendary fall of her city. A woman living in an age of heroes, Cassandra reveals the untold personal story that has been lost among the triumphs of Achilles and Hector.

Christa Wolf was arguably the best-known and most influential writer in the former East Germany. Having grown up during the Nazi regime, she and her family were forced to flee their home like many others, nearly starving to death in the process. Her earliest novels were controversial because they contained veiled criticisms of the Communist regime which landed her on government watch lists. Her past continued to permeate her work and her life, as she said, “You can only fight sorrow when you look it in the eye.� August is Christa Wolf’s last piece of fiction, written in a single sitting as an anniversary gift to her husband. In it, she revisits her stay at a tuberculosis hospital in the winter of 1946, a real life event that was the inspiration for the closing scenes of her 1976 novel Patterns of Childhood. This time, however, her fictional perspective is very different. The story unfolds through the eyes of August, a young patient who has lost both his parents to the war. He adores an older girl, Lilo, a rebellious teenager who controls the wards. Sixty years later, August reflects on his life and the things that she taught him. Written in taut, affectionate prose, August offers a new entry into Christa Wolf’s work and, incidentally, her first and only male protagonist. More than a literary artifact, this new novel is a perfectly constructed story of a quiet life well lived. For both August and Christa Wolf, the past never dies.

An East German writer, awaiting a call from the hospital where her brother is undergoing brain surgery, instead receives news of a massive nuclear accident at Chernobyl, one thousand miles away. In the space of a single day, in a potent, lyrical stream of thought, the narrator confronts both mortality and life and above all, the import of each moment lived-open, as Wolf reveals, to infinite analysis.

A fragmentary work that stands as a testament to Wolf's skill as a thinker, storyteller, and memorializer of humanity’s greatest struggles. Christa Wolf tried for years to find a way to write about her childhood in Nazi Germany. In her 1976 book Patterns of Childhood, she explained why it was so difficult: “Gradually, over a period of months, the dilemma has emerged: to remain speechless or to live in the third person, these seem to be the options. One is impossible, the other sinister.� During 1971 and 1972 she made thirty-three attempts to start the novel, abandoning each manuscript only pages in. Eulogy for the Living, written over the course of four weeks, is the longest of those fragments. In its pages, Wolf recalls with crystalline precision the everyday details of her life as a middle-class grocer’s daughter, and the struggles within the family—struggles common to most families, but exacerbated by the rise of Nazism. And as Nazism fell, the Wolfs fled west, trying to stay ahead of the rampaging Red Army. 

When "The Quest for Christa T. "was first published in East Germany ten years ago, there was an immediate storm: bookshops in East Berlin were given instructions to sell it only to well-known customers professionally involved in literary matters; at the annual meeting of East German Writers Conference, Mrs Wolf's new book was condemmed. Yet the novel has nothing eplicity to do with politics.

"Parting from Phantoms" is a window into the soul of the most prominent writer of the German Democratic Republic and its most famous export, Christa Wolf. The essays, diary entries, and letters in this book document four agonizing years in Wolf's personal history and paint a vivid portrait of the cultural and political situation in the former German Democratic Republic. This collection stands as an important testimony to the personal and cultural costs of German reunification.
"The works in this book constitute an essential document of the history of reunified Germany, and this alone recommends it to scholars and those interested in current European events."-- "Publishers Weekly"
"Christa Wolf was arguably the most influential writer of a nation that no longer exists. . . . "Parting from Phantoms" traces the fever chart of her anguish. . . . In some ways, the rawness of the present volume is its greatest contribution, and its bona fides--testifying to the human cost of deception and self-deception."--Todd Gitlin, "Nation"
"A thrilling display of ideological soul-searching."--Ilan Stavans, "Newsday," Favorite Books of 1997

In this closely argued and admirably lucid study of the late medieval didactic epic Der Ring, Christa Wolf Cross analyzes the dynamics of the narrator-reader relationship. Wittenweiler's narrator presents himself at times as the omniscient and methodical teller of his tale, an authoritative teacher in command both of his material and his audience, and at other points as a playful master who feigns ignorance, appears to mock his own versifying, and challenges the reader to become vigilant to an extraordinary degree and to recognize that he must judge independently what to accept as Wittenweiler's teachings. Cross's investigation leads her to propound new answers to a number of questions that have long perplexed Wittenweiler scholars. While she has much to say to other specialists, her study addresses itself not to them alone but to a larger audience of students of medieval literature as well.