This is the perfect book for paranoid times, "I" introduces us to W, a mere hangeron in East Berlin's postmodern underground literary scene. All is not as it appears, though, as W is actually a Stasi informant who reports to the mercurial David Bowie look-alike Major Feuerbach. But are political secrets all that W is seeking in the underground labyrinth of Berlin? In fact, what W really desires are his own lost memories, the self undone by surveillance: his "I." First published in Germany in 1993 and hailed as an instant classic, "I" is a black comedy about state power and the seductions of surveillance. Its penetrating vision seems especially relevant today in our world of cameras on every train, bus, and corner. This is an engrossing read, available now for the first time in English.

In June 1939 Annemarie Schwarzenbach and fellow writer Ella Maillart set out from Geneva in a Ford, heading for Afghanistan. The first women to travel Afghanistan's Northern Road, they fled the storm brewing in Europe to seek a place untouched by what they considered to be Western neuroses. The Afghan journey documented in All the Roads Are Open is one of the most important episodes of Schwarzenbach's turbulent life. Her incisive, lyrical essays offer a unique glimpse of an Afghanistan already touched by the "fateful laws known as progress," a remote yet "sensitive nerve centre of world politics" caught amid great powers in upheaval. In her writings, Schwarzenbach conjures up the desolate beauty of landscapes both internal and external, reflecting on the longings and loneliness of travel as well as its grace. Maillart's account of their trip, The Cruel Way, stands as a classic of travel literature, and, now available for the first time in English, Schwarzenbach's memoir rounds out the story of the adventure. Praise for the German Edition "Above all, [Schwarzenbach's] discovery of the Orient was a personal one. But the author never loses sight of the historical and social context. . . . She shows no trace of colonialist arrogance. In fact, the pieces also reflect the experience of crisis, the loss of confidence which, in that decade, seized the long-arrogant culture of the West."-Suddeutsche Zeitung

Four classical Greek myths retold with unexpected twists by an East German dissident. Franz Fuhmann's subversive retellings of four Greek legends were first published in East Germany in 1980. In them, Fuhmann plumbs the ancient tales' depths and makes them his own. Attuned to conflict and paradox, he sheds light on the complexities of sex and love, art and beauty, politics and power. In the title story, the love of the goddess Eos for the mortal Tithonos reveals the blessing and curse of transience, while "Hera and Zeus" probes the divine couple's tumultuous relationship and its devastating consequences for a world embroiled in war. Fuhmann's unflinching account of Marsyas' flaying by Apollo has been widely read as a dissident political statement that has lost none of its incisive force. At times charged with sensuality, and at others honed to a keen analytical edge, Fuhmann's shimmering prose is matched by Sunandini Banerjee's exquisite collages.

At the Burning Abyss is Franz Fuhmann's magnum opus a gripping and profoundly personal encounter with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of two troubled lives, a turbulent century, and the liberating power of poetry. Picking up where his last book, The Jew Car, left off, Fuhmann probes his own susceptibility to ideology's seductions Nazism, then socialism and examines their antidote, the goad of Trakl's enigmatic verses. He confronts Trakl's "unlivable life," as his poetry transcends the panaceas of black-and-white ideology, ultimately bringing a painful, necessary understanding of "the whole human being: in victories and triumphs as in distress and defeat, in temptation and obsession, in splendor and in ordure." In 1982, the German edition of At the Burning Abyss won the West German Scholl Siblings Prize, celebrating its "courage to resist inhumanity." At a time of political extremism and polarization, has lost none of its urgency.

Originally published in 1962, Franz Fühmann’s autobiographical story cycle The Jew Car is a classic of German short fiction and an unparalleled examination of the psychology of National Socialism. Each story presents a snapshot of a personal and historical turning point in the life of the narrator, beginning with childhood anti-Semitism and moving to a youthful embrace—and then an ultimate rejection—of Nazi ideology. With scathing irony and hallucinatory intensity, reflections on the nature of memory, and the individual experience of history, the cycle acquires the weight of a novel.

The perfect book for paranoid times, “I” introduces us to W, a mere hanger-on in East Berlin’s postmodern underground literary scene. All is not as it appears, though, as W is actually a Stasi informant who reports to the mercurial David Bowie look-alike Major Feuerbach. But are political secrets all that W is seeking in the underground labyrinth of Berlin? In fact, what W really desires are his own lost memories, the self undone by surveillance: his “I.” First published in Germany in 1993 and hailed as an instant classic, “I” is a black comedy about state power and the seductions of surveillance. Its penetrating vision seems especially relevant today in our world of cameras on every train, bus, and corner. This is an engrossing read, available now for the first time in English.

Friedrich Durrenmatt was one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century, a talent on par with Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bertolt Brecht. A prolific writer of letters, poems, novels, and short fiction, he also wrote essays on literary forms as well as philosophy and politics that provide a window onto his world and his work, demonstrating both his critical acumen and the breadth of his talents as a stylist. Gathered from throughout his long career, the writings featured in Durrenmatt's Selected Essays are by turns playful and polemical, poetic and provocative, mordantly comical and deadly serious. Critics have often been perplexed by Durrenmatt's sudden shifts - from stage to prose and back, from comedy to tragedy and vice versa, from writing to drawing. In this volume, the full range of his interests in arts and letters-and their relationships to each other - becomes evident. In one section, a cluster of essays on the theater illuminate his idiosyncratic dramaturgical theories, drawing on examples from Attic comedy to Schiller, Brecht, and professional wrestling. In another, his philosophical essays mix his passionate reflections on ethical and political questions with his skeptical forays into metaphysics. And in autobiographical pieces such as the monumental "Vallon de l'Ermitage," Durrenmatt offers an intimate look at his "web of time" - the places where he traveled and the people with whom he lived and worked. Suffused with melancholy, flashes of tenderness, and the author's inimitable sense of the grotesque and absurd, these essays provide a compelling look at Durrenmatt's prodigious strength as a writer of nonfiction.

Franz Fuhmann's magnum opus. At the Burning Abyss is a gripping and profoundly personal encounter with the great expressionist poet Georg Trakl. It is a taking stock of two troubled lives, a turbulent century, and the liberating power of poetry. Picking up where his last book, The Jew Car, left off, Fuhmann probes his own susceptibility to ideology's seductions-Nazism, then socialism-and examines their antidote, the goad of Trakl's enigmatic verses. He confronts Trakl's "unlivable life," as his poetry transcends the panaceas of black-and-white ideology, ultimately bringing a painful, necessary understanding of "the whole human being: in victories and triumphs as in distress and defeat, in temptation and obsession, in splendor and in ordure." In 1982, the German edition of At the Burning Abyss won the West German Scholl Siblings Prize, celebrating its "courage to resist inhumanity." At a time of political extremism and polarization, has lost none of its urgency.

Originally published in 1962, Franz Fuhmann's autobiographical story cycle "The Jew Car" is a classic of German short fiction and an unparalleled examination of the psychology of National Socialism. Each story presents a snapshot of a personal and historical turning point in the life of the narrator, beginning with childhood anti-Semitism and moving to a youthful embrace--and then an ultimate rejection--of Nazi ideology. With scathing irony and hallucinatory intensity, reflections on the nature of memory, and the individual experience of history, the cycle acquires the weight of a novel.

"Fuhmann's work, beginning with "The Jew Car," can be read as a great literary self-analysis in the spirit of Freud. Through his work, he not only became conscious of his own thinking as it was seduced by totalitarianism, he also became capable of describing the mechanisms of a fascist upbringing with striking poetic power, transcending all theory." --"Die Welt," on the German edition