Two old men roam through Berlin stopping to eat hamburgers at Macdonald's, observing life in the former German Democratic Republic after the fall of the wall in 1989: Theo Wuttke, former East German cultural functionary and Ludwig Hoftaller - Wuttke's shadow - a mid-level spy who can serve the Gestapo or the Stasi with equal dedication. Grass writes with the wit, fantasy, literary erudition and political acerbity for which he is celebrated. This novel will stand as perhaps the most complex and challenging exploration of what Germany's reunification will eventually come to mean.

A collection of one hundred inter-linked stories celebrating the twentieth century, by Germany's most eminent contemporary writer. As the sequence of stories unfolds, a lively and rich picture emerges, an historical portrait of our century in all its grandeur and in all its horror.

In this new novel Gunter Grass examines a subject that has long been taboo - the sufferings of the Germans during the Second World War. He explores the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, the deadliest maritime disaster of all time, and the repercussions upon three generations of a German family.

The final work of Nobel Prize-winning writer Gunter Grass - a witty and elegiac series of meditations on writing, growing old, and the world. Suddenly, in spite of the trials of old age, and with the end in sight, everything seems possible again: love letters, soliloquies, scenes of jealousy, swan songs, social satire, and moments of happiness. Only an ageing artist who had once more cheated death could get to work with such wisdom, defiance and wit. A wealth of touching stories is condensed into artful miniatures. In a striking interplay of poetry, lyric prose and drawings, Grass creates his final, major work of art. A moving farewell gift, a sensual, melancholy summation of a life fully lived.

Gunter Grass's international fame as a novelist has tended to obscure his achievements in poetry, but his first book was a collection of poems and he has returned faithfully to the medium throughout his writing life. All his preoccupations - social, sexual, moral, gastronomical - are found there, as is the unique mixture of expressionistic grotesquerie and political outspokenness that has characterised his fiction. It is this mixture, as Michael Hamburger, Grass's most constant and sympathetic translator, points out, that has allowed him to act as court jester to the post-war German democratic state, 'telling disagreeable truths'. Selected Poems 1956-1993 encapsulates one of the defining poetic oeuvres of our time.

THE TIN DRUM presents Hitler's rise and fall through the eyes of the dwarfish narrator whose magic powers become symbolic of the dark forces dominating the German nation in the period. Like Thomas Mann's DOCTOR FAUSTUS, Grass's novel explores the dark roots of power and creativity. An early advocate of 'magic realism'. Gunter Grass is the most powerful and celebrated novelist to appear in post-war Germany. His home city of Danzig is a powerful presence in this novel.

One of the greatest modern novels, The Tin Drum is the story of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is being held in a mental institution. Matzerath provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition in the modern world. In this edition, Breon Mitchell, acclaimed translator and scholar, draws from a wealth of detailed scholarship to produce a translation that is more faithful to Grass's style and rhythm than the 1959 translation, restoring omissions and reflecting the complexity of the original work. After more than sixty years, The Tin Drum has, if anything, gained in power and relevance. All of Grass's amazing evocations are still there, and still amazing: Oskar Matzerath, the indomitable drummer; his grandmother, Anna Koljaiczek; his mother, Agnes; Alfred Matzerath and Jan Bronski, his presumptive fathers; Oskar's midget friends--Bebra, the great circus master and Roswitha Raguna, the famous somnambulist; Sister Scholastica and Sister Agatha, the Right Reverend Father Wiehnke; the Greffs, the Schefflers, Herr Fajngold, all Kashubians, Poles, Germans, and Jews--waiting to be discovered and re-discovered.

'Once upon a time there was a father who, because he had grown old, called together his sons and daughters - four, five, six, eight in number - and finally convinced them, after long hesitation, to do as he wished. Now they are sitting around a table and begin to talk...' In this delightful sequel to Peeling the Onion, Gunter Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they record memories of their childhoods, of growing up, of their father, who was always at work on a new book, always at the margins of their lives. Memories contradictory, critical, loving, accusatory - they piece together an intimate picture of this most public of men. To say nothing of Marie, Grass's assistant, a family friend of many years, perhaps even a lover, whose snapshots taken with an old-fashioned Agfa box camera provide the author with ideas for his work. But her images offer much more. They reveal a truth beyond the ordinary detail of life, depict the future, tell what might have been, grant the wishes in visual form of those photographed. The children speculate on the nature of this magic: was the enchanted camera a source of inspiration for their father? Did it represent the power of art itself? Was it the eye of God? The Box is an inspired and daring work of fiction. In its candour, wit, and earthiness, it is Grass at his very best.

In this extraordinary memoir, Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter Grass remembers his early life, from his boyhood in a cramped two-room apartment in Danzig through the late 1950s, when "The Tin Drum "was published. During the Second World War, Grass volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of fifteen but was rejected; two years later, in 1944, he was instead drafted into the Waffen-SS. Taken prisoner by American forces as he was recovering from shrapnel wounds, he spent the final weeks of the war in an American POW camp. After the war, Grass resolved to become an artist and moved with his first wife to Paris, where he began to write the novel that would make him famous. Full of the bravado of youth, the rubble of postwar Germany, the thrill of wild love affairs, and the exhilaration of Paris in the early fifties, "Peeling the Onion--"which caused great controversy when it was published in Germany--reveals Grass at his most intimate.

Gunter Grass has been wrestling with Germany's past for decades now, but no book since "The Tin Drum" has generated as much excitement as this engrossing account of the sinking of the "Wilhelm Gustloff." A German cruise ship turned refugee carrier, it was attacked by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time.
Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke is a middle-aged journalist trying to piece together the tragic events. While his mother sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been less touched by the past. For his teenage son, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corners of the Internet, the "Gustloff" embodies the denial of Germany's wartime suffering.
"Scuttling backward to move forward," "Crabwalk" is at once a captivating tale of a tragedy at sea and a fearless examination of the ways different generations of Germans now view their past.
Winner of the Nobel Prize

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of My Century and The Tin Drum, a novel of broad historical proportions set in Berlin during the years of German reunification.
Two old men roam through Berlin observing life in the former German Democratic Republic after the fall of the Wall in 1989. Theo Wuttke, a former East German functionary, is a keen observer and a gifted speaker. Ludwig Hoftaller is a mid-level spy whose loyalties shift with each new regime. Together, both men see what the future is bringing as they try to save what they can from the past and understand the meaning of being German.
A complex and challenging exploration of what Germany's reunification will mean-for Germans, for Europe, and for the world-Too Far Afield is a masterwork from one of Europe's greatest writers. Written with the wit, fantasy, literary erudition, and political acerbity for which Grass is celebrated, it is a deeply human story laced with pain and humor in equal measure.

In a work of great originality, Germany's most eminent writer examines the victories and terrors of the twentieth century, a period of astounding change for mankind. Great events and seemingly trivial occurrences, technical developments and scientific achievements, war and disasters, and new beginnings, all unfold to display our century in its glory and grimness. A rich and lively display of Grass's extraordinary imagination, the 100 interlinked stories in this volume-one for each year from 1900 to 1999-present a historical and social portrait for the millennium, a tale of our times in all its grandeur and all its horror.

A group of leading intellectuals from all parts of Germany gather in 1647 for the purpose of strengthening the last remaining bond within a divided nation-its language and literature-as the Thirty Years' War comes to an end. Afterword by Leonard Forster. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Novemberland is a bilingual volume of selected poems from the past four decades by Germany's preeminent contemporary writer. Before Guenter Grass's first novel, The Tin Drum, received international acclaim as one of the most important postwar novels ever written, Grass was renowned in his native country for his poetry. Informed by the same baroque inventiveness and mordant wit that characterize such celebrated prose works as The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, Dog Years, and The Flounder, these poems depict a landscape at once recognizably mundane and grotesquely surreal.

The author of The Tin Drum is back in Danzig with The Call of the Toad, a poignant, irreverent, funny novel about two people who find adventure in love and business. The love is late middle-aged; the business is the cemetery business. The couple's vision is to offer plots in Gdansk to those Germans who had been exiled after World War II. He, the German, will provide not only the bodies but cash and know-how; she, the Pole, will provide the human warmth and political fervor. Gunter Grass tells a tale of capitalism taken to absurd extremes as he skewers both the German and the Polish characters, past, present, and future - with the style, tenderness, and baroque inventiveness that have made him famous.

As the Berlin Wall crumbled and the two Germanys became one, Grass was one of a few who spoke out against reunification. In this collection of speeches and debates on the factors destined to reshape Europe, he is caustic, indignant, reflective, and compelling. Translated by Krishna Winston with A. S. Wensinger. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

The setting is Danzig during World War II. The narrator recalls a boyhood scene in which a black cat pounces on his friend Mahlke's "mouse"-his prominent Adam's apple. This incident sets off a wild series of events that ultimately leads to Mahlke's becoming a national hero. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Starusch, a bachelor aged forty teaching "German and history" (two inseparable subjects), undergoes protracted treatment by a dentist who uses TV to distract his patients. Gagged in his chair, the patient projects onto the screen his past and present with the fluidity and visual quality of the movies. Reality and fantasy, the actual and the repressed, overrun the screen in a mirror image of German history. Thus among other episodes we see Krings, one of Hitler's most ferocious "fight-to-the-finish" generals, return from Russian captivity and engage in sandbox reconstructions of Germany's battles, determined to win them this time. In a casual throwaway, the author reveals his true identity -- Field Marshal Schoerner.

Under the influence of local anesthesia, Starusch's imagination releases h erotic fantasies and the very violence he tries to combat in his pupils, one of them a militant Maoist. The dentist, dispensing humdrum wisdom and painkillers with godlike aloofness, objects to violence, real or imagined, advocating universal Sickcare and a diet preventive of caries as a cure-all. Meanwhile, Scherbaum, Starusch's favorite pupil, grimly prepares to burn his dachshund Max to stir u the conscience of dog- and cat-loving Berliners.

Juggling mockingly with lost and found illusions, with the tensions between reformists and revolutionaries, middle age and youth, Grass has created a satirical portrait of social confusions that adds to his customary exuberance a new mastery of subtle control.

It all begins in the Stone Age, when a talking fish is caught by a fisherman at the very spot where millennia later Grass's home town, Danzig, will arise. Like the fish, the fisherman is immortal, and down through the ages they move together. As Grass blends his ingredients into a powerful brew, he shows himself at the peak of his linguistic inventiveness. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Grass-novelist, poet, and graphic artist-is also a committed political activist. In this collection of essays, he takes on writing and politics with his accustomed verve and insight. Introduction by Salman Rushdie. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book