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.

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.

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

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.

"It is impossible not to be impressed by Grass's] inexhaustible desire to experiment with the novel and by the many good stories and passages of exquisite writing in "The Box.""--Charles Simic, "New York Review of Books"
In this inspired and daring work of fiction, Gunter Grass writes in the voices of his eight children as they record memories of their childhoods, of growing up, and especially of their father, who was always at work on a new book, always at the margins of their lives. Memories contradictory, happy, loving, accusatory--they piece together an intimate picture of this most public of men. To say nothing of Marie, a photographer and 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 than simple replication. They reveal a truth beyond ordinary life, depict the future, tell what might have been, grant the wishes 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? An audacious literary experiment, "The Box" is Grass at his 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.

Selected from the vast range of his work, the writings included in this anthology trace Gunter Grass's development as a writer, and with it the history of a nation coming to terms with its past.
Excerpts from Grass's major novels-from The Tin Drum to Crabwalk-are included, as are numerous short fictions, essays, and poems, many of which have never appeared before in English. Grass's gifts as an observer of and participant in the social and political landscape are justly celebrated, as are his inimitable sense of humor, his consistent defense of the disadvantaged, and his mastery of the forms of expression he has employed over the years.
For readers in search of an introduction to his work or for those familiar primarily with his novels, this diverse collection offers a fresh and stimulating introduction to one of the world's greatest living writers.

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.

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.